Hands holding up an iPad with artwork on the screen.

Still from a promotional video for the Hidden Florence in 3D AR app released November 2019

Photo: Hidden Florence

Digital Art History grants support Digital Mapping Projects, Introductory Institutes, Advanced Institutes, and Image Analysis Projects. Below is a list of grants awarded, organized by type:

Introductory Institutes
Advanced Institutes
Digital Mapping
Image Analysis

INTRODUCTORY INSTITUTES

Association of Art Museum Curators

The Networked Curator is a series of workshops aimed at increasing curators' overall digital literacy. Through greater exposure to digital tools and skills, curators are able to better understand the resources and possibilities of digital environments, and collaborate and actively participate in digital initiatives and strategies. Pilot program workshops took place in 2017 and 2018 as a collaboration between the Association of Art Museum Curators and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. In 2020, a group of curators with intermediate digital skills and digital projects underway will participate in a three-part Networked Curator workshop: an online pre-course, an in-person workshop in Miami, and finally participation in the annual conference of the Museum Computer Network in Baltimore. The Networked Curator is organized by the Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation.
Grants Awarded: $89,000 (2016) and $73,000 (2019)

Duke University

Since 2012, Duke University has offered the Visualizing Venice summer institute through its Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (formerly Wired! Lab) in partnership with Venice International University and the Architectural University of Venice. Duke University received Getty support for the 2015 summer institute, which focused on the history of the Venice Biennale. This three-week training program introduced participants to current digital humanities theories, methods, and tools. Topics included digital mapping, data visualization, 3D modeling of buildings, and time-based animations on apps and websites. A second grant supported the 2016 summer institute, Mapping and Modeling the Venice Ghetto, which provided training in mobile application development and other emerging digital tools. A third grant is supporting a more advanced institute in the summers of 2018 and 2019. 3D and (Geo)Spatial Networks brings together teams of art historians and technologists for collaborative development of especially promising digital art history projects.
Grants Awarded: $50,000 (2015), $140,000 (2016), and $197,000 (2017)

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

The Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETHZ received a Getty grant for a 2016 summer institute for German-speaking art historians in Europe, where scholars have expressed a keen interest in digital art history but where no substantial training programs have been offered. Digital Collections: New Methods and Technologies for Art History took place in Zürich over ten days, through a partnership with the University of Zürich's Institute of Art History, the Swiss Institute for Art Research, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Digital Humanities Laboratory. Drawing on the digital collections of these host institutions, the workshop introduced participants to key concepts and tools in the digital humanities, with particular attention to building digital collections, metadata mapping, visual pattern discovery, and geolocation technology. All course materials were made available online, which benefited participants and German-speaking art historians in general.
Grant Awarded: CHF138,800 (2016)

George Mason University

GMU's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, one of the first university centers dedicated to the digital humanities, received Foundation support for a two-week intensive summer institute in 2014, Rebuilding the Portfolio: DH for Art Historians. Participants received an overview of key concepts and technologies, with particular attention paid to the tools that enable art historians to engage in new kinds of teaching and scholarship. The curriculum included building digital collections, working with textual and non-textual sources, visualization, data mining, network analysis, spatial history, and new publishing paradigms. GMU received a second Getty grant to offer the institute again in summer 2015 in a revised format specially designed for graduate students.
Grants Awarded: $155,000 (2013) and $165,000 (2014)

Harvard University

Harvard's metaLAB received Foundation support for Beautiful Data: Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections, a ten-day summer institute in 2014 focused on using digitized collections for art historical scholarship. Responding to the growing open content movement and the increasing number of museum collections freely accessible online, the program addressed curating with digital collections, exploring new technologies for analyzing and visualizing collections, and annotating digital images. The institute combined seminar-style instruction, collaborative problem-solving, and hands-on experience, all culminating in the development of a prototype project. Harvard received a second Getty grant to host the institute again in summer 2015 as Beautiful Data II.
Grants Awarded: $175,000 (2013) and $185,000 (2014)

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere

The Belvedere Research Center in Vienna, Austria, in collaboration with the Center for Image Science at Danube University Krems, received a Getty grant for The Museum in a Digital World: Strategies – Methods – Tools, a 10-day digital institute in Austria during the summer of 2023 for curators and museum staff who curate, manage, and interpret collections. The first half of the institute will provide training in the latest tools and methods for digitization, digital collections management, and the online presentation of museum collections. The second half will provide an in-depth exploration of the use of digital collections, including legal and financial issues, data visualization, and digital storytelling, complemented by site visits and behind-the-scenes tours that illuminate museum practices. Participants will come principally from German-speaking countries in the EU, helping them to develop a regional professional network that can offer support as they apply digital skills to exhibition and collection projects.
Grant Awarded: €99,000 (2022)

University of California, Los Angeles

The Digital Humanities program (UCLA-DH) received Foundation support for an eight-day summer institute in 2014, Beyond the Digitized Slide Library. The Institute provided scholars with a theoretical framework and basic digital literacy, with particular attention paid to GIS mapping and project-based learning, two strengths of UCLA-DH. The curriculum also included lessons on art historical data, metadata basics, visualization, mapping, and network analysis. Participants presented their projects at a final colloquium that will provide an opportunity to discuss the future of publishing digital scholarship. The program was offered again in 2015, with continued Getty support.
Grants Awarded: $185,000 (2013) and $180,000 (2014)

ADVANCED INSTITUTES

Duke University

A 2017 grant supported Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D and (Geo)Spatial Networks, two advanced institutes that brought together teams of art historians and technologists for the development of especially promising digital art history projects. Building off two earlier grants (see Introductory Institutes above), these workshops tested a new model of participation, with art historians accompanied by the visual media scholars, 3-D and virtual reality specialists, historians, librarians, filmmakers, and programmers with whom they collaborate. In 2022, Getty supported a new advanced institute, Exhibiting Hidden Histories: Bringing Projects to Publics through Digital Exhibitions and XR, focused on geospatial analysis. This institute includes two workshops over two years for art historians, technologists, and project managers to explore how best to turn scholarly research into public facing outcomes using digital tools (such as virtual worlds, augmented reality, and installation experiences); how to convey difficult and hidden histories related to the built environment; and how to develop sustainable, scalable digital projects. The institute is hosted by Venice International University and organized alongside colleagues from University of Padua and University of Exeter.
Grant Awarded: $197,000 (2017) and $250,000 (2022)

King's College London

King's College London received Foundation support for the advanced digital institute Ancient Itineraries which focused on the use of structured data in digital projects related to ancient art. With well-structured data sets that include standardized information, scholars can create virtual models—or visualizations—to generate new research questions, test hypotheses, and present findings, particularly pertaining to provenience (the original "find site" and cultural context of an object) and provenance (ownership history and object biographies). The institute included workshops in London and Athens that emphasized Linked Open Data with the ultimate goal of giving participants a greater conceptual understanding and technical mastery of data structuring and resulting data visualizations.
Grant Awarded: £162,000 (2018)

The University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh received a Getty grant to offer an advanced digital art history institute dedicated to network analysis, a method well suited to art-historical research. Network analysis visualizes connections between artists and patrons, between works of art and sites of display, and among artists themselves. The advanced institute brought together eight teams of art historians and scientists already engaged in joint network analysis projects to deepen their technical and conceptual familiarity with data science. The program advanced participating projects to the next stage and fostered new cross-disciplinary research.
Grant Awarded: $223,000 (2018)

DIGITAL MAPPING

Rice University

The Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Rice University will collaborate with the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro on a two-year project to digitally integrate historical photography and cartography into imagineRio, a platform that charts changes in the city's landscape and topography over time. The project will digitize 4,000 photographic views of Rio de Janeiro from the 19th and 20th centuries in the IMS collection and incorporate them into the existing model, greatly expanding the number and variety of geo-located visual representations of Rio accessible to researchers. The project contributes to the understanding of the evolution of Rio de Janeiro and its built environment, and by extension other cities, through the integration of its photographic and cartographic heritage. Using innovative technologies such as monoplotting, photographs can be geo-referenced down to the level of individual pixels. The project will also develop new models to generate a 3D version of imagineRio from archival data and digitized historical photographs.
Grant awarded: $216,000 (2019)

Stanford University

For the past 25 years, Stanford University has led archaeological excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, a large Neolithic settlement that flourished around 7000 BC. These excavations have revealed new information about the origins of human settlements, the rise of civilization, and the emergence of religion and early object-making, including wall paintings, sculpture, and figural ceramics. With Getty support, this data collected over two decades will now be made available through the Çatalhöyük Living Archive, a GIS web application designed to serve as a database for archaeologists, art historians, and the general public to explore the site and its associated artifacts. The web application source code will also be made available as open access software.
Grant Awarded: $220,000 (2019)

University of Exeter

The University of Exeter will collaborate with the University of Cambridge and the University of Toronto to construct a layered and interactive view of the art and architecture of Renaissance Florence. The project will integrate elements of three existing platforms: a 3D modeling project; a GPS-enabled mobile application; and a project that provides access to historic census data through a GIS platform based on the 1584 Buonsignori map of Florence. This new resource will open up interpretive possibilities for the multitude of Florentine artworks dispersed in museum and gallery collections worldwide and represent the artworks in their digitally reconstructed original settings. The platform will highlight important buildings that have been demolished or altered and recreate lost spatial and architectural environments for displaced artworks. A "time-slide" feature will display the urban landscape at different moments in time. Additionally, a mobile augmented reality app with GPS capability will allow users to examine these reconstructions in situ and permit researchers to annotate the platform's 3D models while exploring contemporary Florence on foot.
Grant Awarded: $230,000 (2019)

University of Massachusetts Amherst

The University of Massachusetts Amherst, in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, will complete a three-year project titled the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP), a resource designed to contextualize detailed descriptions of Pompeii's artwork within its well-documented archaeological landscape. Drawing upon the existing Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project, PALP will enable users to locate artworks geographically and make complex connections between them. The project will allow researchers to ask the complex and imaginative questions that are essential in speculative research, from something as simple as searching for the location of every Pompeiian visual representation of Hercules, to a complex query refining these representations by region, style, and architectural setting. Users will be able to view the artworks on a map, search the inventory by keyword, and explore different categories of spatial or iconographic relationships.
Grant Awarded: $245,000 (2019)

IMAGE ANALYSIS

Cornell University

With the support of a Getty grant, Cornell University, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is developing an open-source software called the Moldmate Verification Toolkit (MVT). The MVT will use computer vision algorithms to identify laid paper "moldmates," sheets of handmade paper used for prints and drawings that were formed on the same wire mesh mold and then sold together. The technology promises major research advances, as existing techniques for moldmate identification rely on laborious hand-counting processes or the presence of distinguishing watermarks, which were often lost when artworks were trimmed for presentation or storage. The MVT allows researchers to establish chronology in large bodies of work from single artists, resolve attribution questions, establish links between artists and their circles, and identify the re-use of paper from earlier periods. The final software toolkit will consist of free, open-source modules that work with various image types, such as beta-radiographs, low-energy x-radiographs, and transmitted light photographs, and that can be customized for various art objects, including drawings, prints, and books.
Grant Awarded: $245,000 (2019)

University of California, Davis

A Getty grant to UC Davis is helping develop a pioneering digital platform that will allow museums and researchers to share information about early European prints. This platform will use open-source software called Archive Vision (Arch-V) to allow users to investigate unknown or poorly documented prints simply by uploading the image in question. The Arch-V software uses computer algorithms to recognize patterns in digital images, helping users to identify duplicate or similar images (such as multiple prints from the same woodblock). After making a match, users can download the related metadata, such as the artist, title, medium, and date for a work of art. This new process will save significant time and labor for museums and libraries with collections of early European prints worldwide, and will allow more of these prints to be searchable for researchers as well. Grant funds are enabling the Arch-V project team to improve the software, create the digital infrastructure for broader use, and build institutional partnerships.
Grant Awarded: $274,500 (2019)

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