Description: This project proposes to make available to students digital images of art and architecture of such high quality that they can be studied in detail, in a process of free exploration paralleling that of art historians when conducting first-hand research on works of art.
Images of this quality are currently available commercially only in very rare cases, and even these are not sufficiently controlled by teachers and students to be useful for class assignments, preparation of reports and term papers, and indeed for independent student research. Moreover, in spite of my investigation of projects proposed at other institutions, which I conducted recently while a visiting scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, I have been unable to discover any plans for projects comparable to the one proposed here.
In many college level courses, the primary use of images is for identification. Students are asked to learn the names, locations, and dates of works of art shown in lectures. For this purpose, digital imagery of slides provides a more convenient review mechanism than has previously been available. However, lecture slides being digitized are almost always digitized at low resolution, so they are useful only for identification.
A different use of digital imagery, not yet developed for undergraduate teaching and research, is the preparation of extremely high quality digital images of works of art and architecture, scanned at high resolution. I have produced one such Photo CD as a demonstration of how students could use digital technology to zoom in on whatever details catch their interest. For example, a student may wish to read an inscription, to examine the brushwork in a painting or a damaged area of a sculpture, or to study the construction of an arch in a cathedral.
A select group of such images provided with identifications (for example 100 high quality color images of a major monument, such as Chartres Cathedral or of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House) put on a Photo CD, would provide outstanding study material for a week's assignment in an art history or humanities course. Even more impressively, where a large enough body of high quality digital images could be made available in a limited field, students would be able to formulate and pursue their own research topics. Provision of an extensive body of high quality color images necessary for independent research must depend on the personal slide collections of art historians who have themselves taken, over the years, large numbers of high quality slides in their areas of expertise. Moreover, with specialized knowledge of the art they have photographed -- and often with privileged access to works of art -- art historians may obtain crucial images and subtle details not available in any publication at any price. Art historians have expended the time, effort and money necessary to take such photographs precisely because they are necessary evidence when one is conducting independent research on a body of art. For the same reason, a sufficient body of high quality images is necessary if students are to engage in a process of independent research comparable to the scholarship of an art historian.
For images of this sort to be studied properly, students must be able to view pairs of images side-by-side. This allows them to compare related works of art, examine different views of the same piece, or focus on the details of an image while maintaining a view of the whole. A comprehensive body of very high quality digital images, examined under these conditions, would make possible a type of free exploration and individual discovery previously impossible at the undergraduate level.
Implementation: The key steps in pursuing this project are to: (1) creating one very high quality computer workstation in order that art history faculty may gain proficiency in creating and manipulating high resolution digital images of works of art in various forms; (2) having slides of works of art, already taken for research purposes by art history faculty at Reed, digitized commercially, taking new slides where necessary; (3) creating assignments of various types, including research assignments, based on these high resolution images; (4) testing these assignments in small seminar type art history classes; (5) evaluating student understanding of these assignments, especially in comparison to assignments using traditional image materials; (6) based on these results, creating assignments for art history and humanities classes with larger enrollment; (7) testing and evaluating student understanding of these assignments; (8) sharing with other faculty at Reed, in art history and other departments, the experience of assigning these high resolution images; (9) discussing with interested faculty potential uses of high resolution images in their classes; (10) writing a report with the following recommendation: (a) potential uses of digital imagery, especially high resolution digital imagery, at Reed; (b) the type of image library that would be desirable to support these uses; (c) the type of workstations and other computer facilities desirable to support these uses; (11) sharing this report with sister institutions and making it widely available.
Impact: The materials developed in this project would be applied initially in Art 422, Art History and Conservation, an advanced seminar. After thorough testing, this type of approach could be extended to any art history class for which the faculty member teaching the course has an extensive slide collection. During the 1996-97 school year, digital image projects would be assigned in the Introduction to the History of Art, usually taken by 40-50 students. Thereafter, I would expect students to utilize digital images in Humanities courses, taken by several hundred Reed students each year.