No source: created in electronic format.
This paper will present the project Digital Mellini:
Exploring New Tools & Methods for Art-historical
Research & Publication, a joint initiative of the Getty
Research Institute (Los Angeles) and the University of Málaga (Spain). This
paper shall discuss several aspects and challenges related to the
development of digital resources for art-historical research.
The main
objectives for the Digital Mellini Project
are:
These objectives can be seen within the framework of the recent growing interest that many of us in the art-historical community have in response to the challenges offered by the digital society – we need to analyze and reflect critically on the ‘digital status’ of the discipline of art history from both the methodological and epistemological perspectives. We must be willing to open innovative and creative paths in the design of digital resources for art-historical research – paths that will lead to new lines of investigation and new methods of and attitudes toward information-sharing.
Art historians
must participate in the development of tools in the Digital Humanities. In
an article published in the Chronicle of Higher
Education in 2009,
Johanna Drucker pointed out that many of the critical debates that have
characterized the development of the humanities in recent decades – subjectivity
of interpretation, multicultural perspectives, a recognition of the social
nature of the production of knowledge, etc. – are absent in the design of
digital resources. Instead, more emphasis has been placed on adapting to the
characteristics of digital media than to the epistemological and interpretive
exigencies of the various humanistic disciplines.
Regarding the hope that Digital Humanities will assume this new role, we perceive the need to build environments that are intellectually productive and will facilitate interpretive and critical studies above and beyond simple information systems designed for the storage and retrieval of data.
The Digital Mellini
Project is a response to these challenges, as the aim of the
project is to contribute to the development of virtual research environments
(VRE) to promote critical research in the field of art history.
The Digital Mellini
Project includes another desideratum that has emerged
in recent years: the production of knowledge based on aggregation and
collaboration. The culture of open, shared knowledge, which was already
being promulgated by UNESCO as early as 2005 as a fundamental way to
transition from the information society to the knowledge society, along with
the possibilities offered by Web 2.0 technologies, is an essential factor
within the evolution of digital scholarship.
There are already
several projects oriented toward the development of collaborative
environments (NINES, The Transcribe Bentham
Project
Electronic publications and digital editions are not new in the realm of Digital Humanities; the first reflections on what an electronic edition might be appeared in Finneran (1996) and Bornstein and Tinkle (1998). There are also reflections and proposals relating to collaborative editions of unpublished manuscripts in which a dispersed community of scholars could add annotations, as in the case of the Peirce Project (Neuman et al. 1992) and the Codex Leningradensis (Leningrad Codex Markup Project 2000).
Nevertheless, as Susan Hockey (2004) states in her summary of the history of Digital Humanities, ‘The technical aspects of this are fairly clear. Perhaps less clear is the management of the project, who controls or vets the annotations, and how it might all be maintained for the future’.
Similarly, the Digital Mellini Project intends to continue this line
of research, addressing the questions that still remain open and launching
new ones, cultivating debate and reflection.
The Digital Mellini Project focuses on a particular text, an unpublished
manuscript written in 1681 by Pietro Mellini, a Roman nobleman. This text
belongs to the Getty Research Library, Special Collections, found under the
title Relatione migliori di Casa delle pittura Melini.
Pietro Mellini poetically described the best works as he inventoried the
collection of his family’s paintings. This text carries a self-interest for art
historical research due to its uniqueness – it is the only document known to
date that has a hybrid composition of ekphrastic description in poetic form with
a factual descriptive inventory. In addition, it is an important source for
studies related to collecting, the market valuation of art, the provenance of
collections, etc. Most of the works are unidentified and to analyze their
possible allocations through the descriptions provided by Pietro Mellini is a
very attractive task for art historians. Lastly, this text gives us an
opportunity to explore the possibilities that digital media offers to deepen the
relationships between text and image. One of the objectives of the critical
edition is to establish hypotheses about the identity of the works described
within the manuscript.
To carry out this critical collaborative edition, the Digital Mellini Project is developing a computational prototype. Exploring the possibilities of Drupal, a digital environment is being designed and conceived specifically to this analytic objective. Currently, the project team has completed an alpha version of the digital workspace. The first prototype of a beta version is expected to be finished by the end of 2012.
This prototype was constructed around the object of the critical edition, Mellini’s text, and it includes:
Note, therefore, that what is proposed as a digital critical edition is far from the conventional academic model of a print publication, which would exist in a static format as the end result of an interpretive study. The result may have been made by one or several specialists, but in the end, what we find is the proposal of one particular interpretation. It is also far from the digital editions that fit this model (eg Van Gogh Letters Project) or electronic repositories focused mainly on the analysis and exploration of texts (The Orlando Project-History of British Women’s Writing). The proposed model is multifaceted. Digital Mellini simultaneously integrates multiple and sometimes contradictory and paradoxical views. It is open and dynamic. Due to processing system records and the dialogue between specialists in the critical annotation process, we can reconstruct the interpretive process itself, as aggregation and contributions grow over time. Therefore, the digital edition is not only the end product of a study and/or research, but also the intellectual and interpretive process through which it unfolds.
In the digital edition, in addition to showing this prototype and its performance, we will address in more detail the intellectual and methodological questions that confront us while developing a resource of this kind, taking into consideration the goal of advancing digital scholarship in the field of art history and the Humanities in general. These topics include:
Finally, the conclusive question: how can the discipline of art history move away from single authorial models toward more open, collaborative models of research and publication?
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