The Digitalin the Classroom: Reflections on the Intersection of Colonial Latin American Art History and Digital Art History Pedagogy
Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank is the Dean of Content and Strategy for Smarthistory; before that she was an Associate Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University. She has published broadly on art of the art of the Spanish Americas, the Iberian Peninsula, digital art history, and pedagogy.
This is the source
This essay explores the challenges of using
Este ensayo explora los desafíos de usar lo digital,
tanto académica como
pedagógicamente, para comprender y analizar el arte colonial latinoamericano.
Sostiene que las herramientas y los métodos de la historia del arte digital (DAH)
ofrecen nuevas formas de pensar sobre la no neutralidad de cómo accedemos,
recopilamos, y entendemos la información descubierta en línea. Específicamente, se
centra en las respuestas al cuestionario y en el desarrollo de un proyecto
colaborativo Omeka (con estudiantes) para considerar cómo se produce el conocimiento
en el entorno digital. Reflexiona sobre temas de epistemología digital y visual,
visualidad digital, ontología de la historia del arte, accesibilidad y
neocolonialismo, y cómo estos temas han sido abordados con estudiantes en una clase
enfocada en el arte colonial.
This article explores digital methods for analyzing colonial Latin American art.
[D]igital media is not neutral: It impacts the represented
information and the ways society interprets it
Digital visual media, such as images and videos, form an inescapable cornerstone of
our lived experience. For those of us in higher education, the digital is altering
not only how and what we research but also how and what we teach. In a similar vein
as other specializations, the study of colonial Latin American art is being
transformed.art
and visual
culture
with full understanding that there are important differences
between them. For the sake of space, I do not unpack the manifold meanings of
either term.
Despite art historians’ possible role to play in shaping and framing the digital
world, there is still an ambivalence about what the digital turn has to offer art
history. An assessment of the impact of the digital,
and more specifically the
digital humanities (DH) and digital art history (DAH), on the field of art history
reveals that there are those who believe the digital turn has the potential to
positively disrupt it (e.g., Honig 2018) and those who
feel it has the potential to problematically disturb it (e.g., Bishop 2015). Regardless of where an individual’s
position falls on this spectrum, the digital is here to stay, and it is reinventing
art history and the manner in which we access, engage with, asses, and frame visual
culture. One wonders, as Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega (2013b) has, if Donald Preziosi (1991)
could have imagined the impact the digital would have on how we rethink art history,
a suggestion he first made about the art-historical
discipline in the wake of post-structuralist and post-modern critiques of art and the
(im)possibility of stable meaning.
For all these reasons, it is important that we equip ourselves with the ability to
understand how the digital frames or reframes our understanding of visual culture and
to effectively critique it. As art historians know all too well, framing devices
construct a visual rhetoric, one that creates certain epistemological and methodological assumptions,
in the words of Elli
Doulkaridou [2015, 69]. Something as seemingly
simple as substituting, in class, a high-resolution gigapixel panoramic 360° photo of
the church of San Pablo de Ocongate in Peru neutral, innocuous space that delivers
information
but as a cultural, political, and
ideological venue
For these reasons it is imperative to think about not only the technological tools needed to engage in digital practices and meaning-making, but also the critical tools needed to think about what content to produce and how to produce it. I would add to this that we also need the critical tools to think about, assess, and communicate what and how we experience and interact with (i.e. what we consume) online. Even those of us who do not intend to make DAH tools or projects will encounter and use them, and most if not all art historians now employ digitized images for our teaching and research. The very way these digitized images are aggregated and framed has the potential to shift our field — ontologically, epistemologically, and pedagogically.
This essay grapples with some of the complexities that the digital poses for those of
us who teach and research colonial Latin American art. It asks a number of questions:
In what ways can DAH methods and tools, as well as digitized visual materials, help
us to think more critically or differently about visual culture? What challenges
exist when working with digital images, tools, and methods?
To collect information from other scholars teaching and researching the visual
culture of colonial Latin America, I distributed a questionnaire in English to the
Association of Latin American Art (ALAA) listserv.
Fourteen individuals responded to the survey, offering a small, yet useful
The general consensus from the responses on the questionnaire is that working with
digital tools and digitized visual materials offers clear benefits to any scholar or
student of art history, regardless of their specialization.yes
because they were unsure how to define DAH
altogether, noting that they could not align themselves with it if they do not know
what it is, and if art historians more generally cannot agree how to define it.
Respondents relied on a wide range of digital tools and methods for their research,
but this use was more limited pedagogically.
Digital Art History is one aspect of the Digital Humanities, and both have affected
the development of the humanities more broadly. Those engaged with DAH cross
disciplinary boundaries, incorporating not only art history and computer science, but
also media studies and library and information science. As the questionnaire
responses highlighted, defining DH or DAH is challenging, as there is no clear
consensus around how to understand either digital
will be dropped
from digital art history simply aggregate data and/or
images
are examples of digitized art history
It is more valuable perhaps to distinguish between digital inflection and digital
centeredness. The former uses certain digital technologies to create something that
is similar to existing modes of writing or teaching; for instance, asking students to
reflect on an artwork in a blog post. Digital centeredness suggests foregrounding
digital technologies to generate new types of questions, methods, or ideas that more
traditional ones cannot or have not; for instance, creating 3D models
Most questionnaire respondents insinuated that the digital turn offers important benefits for pedagogy, research, and the very manner in which we determine what constitutes colonial Latin American visual culture, even if what DAH is remains amorphous. The increase, especially in the past decade, of projects revolving around colonial Latin American art supports this claim that DAH is beneficial (see also Mundy and Leibsohn 2017). These projects offer specialists and students alike the ability to learn about Latin American visual culture and its history in multimodal ways (such as with photographs, video, 3D reconstructions, 360-degree panoramas, text, music, and data visualizations), and even exposure to less canonical (e.g., Vistas), partial, or destroyed objects (e.g., Digital Aponte), architecture, and primary sources related to the visual, material record.
A few survey responses indicated the importance of reaching out to different publics
— scholars, students, anyone interested in colonial Latin American art, and those
individuals who might develop interest in it as a result of searching the Web.
Projects like Vistas, Digital Códice Mendoza
A couple respondents mentioned that DAH has the ability to challenge entrenched ideas
about the field of art history, and the role of colonial Latin American art within
it. For example, one noted the importance of nimble online projects like Smarthistory
as alternatives to textbooks that are not updated regularly. Smarthistory is, for
lack of a better term, a not-for-profit open educational resource that focuses on
world art. It is the result of collaboration among more than 400 art historians. New
essays and videos can be added continuously and information updated regularly,
helping to dispel the notion that art history — and colonial Latin American art by
extension — is fixed.
The idea that digital art history projects can reach wider audiences and disrupt the
field of colonial Latin American art history is one that warrants greater discussion.
Here, I would like to offer a few reflections and discussion points about how
incorporating digital art history practices into undergraduate classes about colonial
Latin American visual culture has encouraged better digital critical thinking by
encouraging students to think about art history’s ontological issues and
nomenclature, descriptive metadata, and issues of colonialism (or neocolonialism), as
well as the ways in which digital images have the potential to reframe how we
understand the visual culture of this region and time period.
Art history has long been about classifying art based on style and iconography. One
could argue that for much of its existence, the field has been focused on cataloging
works of art and architecture to create, as much as possible, neat taxonomies. If we
think back to the origins of the discipline, the art historians who shaped the
formation of art history in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth
centuries, from Johann Winckelmann, Aby Warburg, and Erwin Panofsky to Alois Riegl,
Hienrich Wöfflin, and George Kubler, created classification systems and vocabularies
still used today to discuss form and subject matter. They are systems largely
centered around and stemming from European art.
The nomenclature of art history developed to describe European art has been appended
to the visual culture of areas outside of Europe, including those areas, such as
Latin America, in which Europeans invaded and colonized people and introduced new
visual systems. Colonial Latin American art calls into question where we have
centered the canon, the terminology we use to discuss art, and even the spaces and
places where art is found. Periodizations describing European artistic trends do not
transplant neatly (nor should they) to the Americas, creating what Ananda
Cohen-Aponte [2017, 69] notes is one of many
unresolved issues
facing scholars who study colonial
Latin American visual culture. Cohen-Aponte points to the innocuous terminology
[2017, 69]
applied to viceregal art, seeking to problematize it in an attempt to decolonize art
history. Jeanette Peterson has similarly discussed how a term such as Renaissance
advances or impedes our ability to analyze and understand
visual culture from the viceregal period
[2008, 322]. She asks, for instance, how do we categorize an early seventeenth-century ivory figure of the Mexican Virgin of
Guadalupe made by Chinese carvers working in the Philippines, transported across
the Pacific in the Manila galleon fleet bound for Acapulco and ultimately destined
for American and European consumers?
[2008, 331–332]. Do we simply note it as Renaissance or the more generic
sixteenth century? Despite the challenges with applying these terms to colonial Latin
American visual culture, it has proven difficult to omit them entirely, even in
instances when they do not fit comfortably (e.g., Sullivan 1996; Peterson 2008, 322).
Where does digital art history fit into these discussions about nomenclature and the
ontology of art history? If we were to reconceptualize Peterson’s question about the
ivory figure of Guadalupe from the point of view of DAH, we might ask, how could we
translate this object, one which resists easy classification, into tidy,
I would argue that there are DAH processes and ideas that can assist scholars and
students to think more critically about the terminology used to describe colonial
Latin American art in the digital environment. If one of the main reasons for
engaging with the digital is to access information, as the questionnaire responses
all noted, then how we input, organize, aggregate, and source that data is
fundamentally significant. My own experiences with introducing students to metadata,
as one step towards producing a collaborative online exhibition on Omeka, has
stimulated important and thought-provoking conversations about how we describe,
analyze, frame, and discuss colonial Latin American art.
To create their online exhibition with Omeka, students must learn about metadata. In
the process of creating metadata, students must weigh the eurocentric (and colonial)
bias of art historical nomenclature and terminology. Metadata is data about data to
help create an archive or catalogue for retrieving information. It enables us to
locate, evaluate, and use specific types of visual images (including video). Omeka
uses Dublin Core elements to create metadata, and these elements include title,
subject, description, creator, source, publisher, date, format, type, identifier, and
coverage
Beyond these metadata fields, users can also create tags to help identify and locate items. For Arellano’s painting, these might include
title: Virgin of Guadalupe
subject: Madonnas (using the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials) or perhaps Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint — Apparitions and miracles (using the LCSH, or Library of Congress Subject Headings)
author: Manuel de Arellano
description: A painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, one of the most venerated Marian advocations in the world. It replicates the original tilma worn by Juan Diego.
creator: LACMA
source: LACMA
publisher: LACMA
date: 1691 (or the date of the photograph)
format: oil on canvas (or the type of digital file)
identifier: a URL to the LACMA collection page
coverage: Mexico
painting,
sacred,
Marian imagery,
seventeenth century, and so forth.
Deciding what to write in each field can be complicated, and tougher still when it
becomes clear that this information that seems objective is actually a fiction of
objectivity. Many metadata descriptions are subjective. As several scholars remark,
objectivity
is defined by consensus, not by authority.
Metadata needs to be a part of that consensus-building process
Descriptive metadata is thus a crucial component for how we access and even analyze
visual artifacts. Yet descriptive metadata is indexed with words that must be input
by people who bring their own interpretative lens to the process. Murtha Baca
describes the inherent challenges to this process, and the problems it can pose for
creating Anyone familiar with art information knows that often the subject
matter or theme of a work of art is not reflected at all in its title. . . . I
can only find them [images] if the descriptive terms . . . have been applied to
them by a human being who has looked at an image, interpreted the file, the
visual information, and other available data, and made the decision to apply
these data values to it [2002, 34].
This question is repeatedly posed in my classes focused on the visual culture of the
Spanish Americas. Early on in the courses, I ask students to create metadata (using
the Dublin Core fields) for the open chapel murals of the convento of San Nicolás,
Actopan, in Hidalgo, Mexico. This low-stakes activity, completed on paper in teams,
helps them learn about Dublin Core elements before they actually complete their main
course project on Omeka. They need to fill in the fields for title, subject,
description, creator, source, date, format, identifier, and coverage.
Almost every student struggles with what to write in the creator field, with
descriptors ranging from
lied toabout the superficial objectivity of information in image captions, or in this case, with metadata found online.
In the following period, I ask students to create tags of the same image, and they
have ranged from Last Judgment
, polychromy
, and mendicant art
to
bright
, damaged
, and early modern
. This generates another
reflective moment in the class about the usefulness of tagging, but also the
limitations and potential problems of indexing images more generally. The discussion
eventually turns to the possibility of social tagging, a common practice on social
media sites like Tumblr and Flickr (and even among museum sites like the Brooklyn
Museum). Many students have noted that social tagging might circumvent some of the
problems associated with the controlled vocabulary used commonly for metadata (like
the Library of Congress [LoC] subject headings). With social tagging, more voices
could be represented, and in different languages, providing more opportunities to
find images like the Actopan open chapel. The general idea of social tagging
certainly can aid in overcoming some of the limitations of controlled vocabularies or
the folksonomy,
or
language created by
screen) to the specific (
oars).
viceregal art…as art that just so happened totocoincide with colonization
art produced[2017, 74].under colonization
This exercise not only prompts reflection and critique about metadata and art
historical nomenclature, but also reveals some of the limitations of DAH in the
process. As one student in this class stated, if we can’t agree
[on] what to write in most of these [Dublin Core] elements, then how will that
affect how people locate our materials?
Another noted that she felt she
would have an easier time with inputting an image of
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel but it is really hard to create clear information
about some [colonial] Mexican art.
Yet another student’s response is
telling of how important these thorny questions and considerations are: [E]ven if we can’t agree on what to write [for the metadata], we
still need to move forward. . . . Otherwise, people might not even know it exists
if they don’t go to college or read books.
I believe what this student was
hinting at is the same idea posed by Mark Turin in his essay on
mediated through the digital. If something [is] not discoverable through an online search or a digital catalogue, it could appear to not exist at all[2015, 125.] These students have determined some of the challenges of DAH. Many DAH projects rely on metadata, and metadata is created by people, with all of their biases and irrationalities. They had honed in on the very humanness of the digital humanities.
Can the metadata we create about colonial Latin American objects be a form of digital colonialism? This is a question raised on several occasions in my classes. Metadata produces knowledge in the online environment, shaping how people relate to and understand Latin American visual culture. If the information that we create perpetuates colonialist discourse, overlooks the diversity of voices that lay claim to this cultural heritage, or simplifies the information so as to become anachronistic, then there is the risk of participating in acts of neocolonialism. In this complex digital world in which we live then, how do we responsibly create digital content without engaging in digital or technological colonialism? What ethical considerations are involved in the production of knowledge in the digital environment? And what does this look like for those of us who teach and research the visual culture of colonial Latin America?
When I first developed this project, and as students continued to learn about Omeka
and the Dublin Core elements for their course project, students decided that it would
be useful if everyone in the team relied on the LoC Subject Headings (LCSH) and
Classification for specific elements, such as creator. The LCSH are frequently used,
not only in the U.S. but also internationally, and are considered a more traditional
classification system. I initially agreed with the students’ decision to proceed
accordingly. However, as became clear to myself and students, even a quick scan of
the LCSH reveals that they can unknowingly perpetuate colonialist, biased, and racist
discourse. For instance, to familiarize students with the LCSH, I asked students to
look at how monographs about Spanish colonial art incorporated them in the front
matter.
Indians of Mexico — ethnic identity,
Indian art,or
Indians of Mexico — Missions — History — 16th century.The terms Indigenous or First Nation do not appear, and often the specific ethnic group or groups are omitted from LCSH unless the monograph is specific to one of them (and if the term exists at all). The use of terminology like
Indian artis thus vague and reductionistic, but also reifies the colonialist discourse that so many postcolonial and decolonial thinkers have attempted to alter.
One way in which it is possible to rectify some of these imbalances and problems is
to do what the University of Alberta’s Decolonizing Description Working Group (DDWG)
has done, and what other institutions, such as the John Carter Brown Library, are
seeking to do.The goal of this project is to assess
how digital tools and metadata created through collaborative processes across a
hemispheric arc can serve scholarly and non-scholarly communities now and into
the future.
See https://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc/applicants/john-carter-brown-library-brown-university/.
to investigate, define
and propose a plan of action for how UAL can more accurately, appropriately, and
respectfully represent Indigenous peoples and contexts through our descriptive
metadata practices
appropriate
subject access and descriptive practices are a social justice issue and a moral
imperative.
They provide examples of the transformations they have made to
subject headings used in metadata, such as switching Abused
Indian children,
the LCSH, to Abused Indigenous
children.
In class, students have seemed excited about the possibility of
such a project, especially the notion of descriptive metadata practices as they
relate to social justice issues, and how this might alter how publics access and
understand information they encounter on the Web. One student commented that she
never had thought about these things before, like how racist
or gendered metadata could be. I’d really never thought about metadata at
all.
She reflected that the components of the Omeka project had even
caused her to rethink what she sees on her personal social media accounts (like
Instagram and Facebook) and YouTube.
The process of creating this course project raises the question of how we can be
mindful of not replicating colonialism in new ways. As discussed above, the process
of metadata creation seems simple enough on the surface, but in reality is a more
complex venture. As Roopika Risam advises, we must be wary of the violence that
occurs in discursive forms,
such as reproducing colonial influences in the production of digital knowledge and
centering epistemologies and ontologies of the Global North . . . which in turn
decenters those of Indigenous communities and the Global South
[2018, 2]. For those of us who practice art history, we
must be cognizant of how metadata — and digital tools and projects beyond this — has
the ability to act as a neocolonial dynamic, and one that situates the Global North
as the site of knowledge production.
Access to materials, whether to digital photographs (or videos) or to archival or scholarly materials about colonial Latin American visual culture, impinges upon what and how we teach and research. High-resolution images are essential for teaching and research, and more than half of the survey’s respondents mentioned the need for their greater availability. Among the many reasons increased accessibility is needed, respondents listed the high cost of travel and the many international collections that now possess colonial Latin American objects, as well as the lack of high-res images in repositories like ArtStor or Bridgeman Images. For the latter, there is also a fee to acquire them. Moreover, as the academy continues to rely on adjunct labor with absurdly low pay, the need for free, open access to materials was noted as imperative. One response indicated that with greater access to objects and places that are less well known (if at all) the conversations around colonial Latin American art could also noticeably shift.
Besides access to high-resolution digital images, participants noted that certain digital tools or projects also could bypass pay-walled journals with costly subscriptions or academic presses that sell materials at high costs, all of which are largely inaccessible without access to a university library. As one respondent noted, DAH projects about Latin American visual culture challenge how and where knowledge is stored; rather than solely in academic journals or printed books, DAH projects have the potential to remove burdensome financial costs, to provide free access to anyone untethered to a university system, and to allow for more collaboration across international borders.
While access to more visual and textual materials was noted as a priority for researching and teaching about Latin American visual culture, respondents also noted that digitization initiatives and DAH projects have important limitations. One respondent worried about the implications of a project’s obsolescence. Several commented on the issue of collections (visual or archival) that do not have the funds or equipment to digitize their materials, or individuals who do not receive funding to produce and maintain a project online. Their concern is that research agendas and general trends in the field could therefore be determined on what is and is not available digitally. Mundy and Leibsohn (2017) agree that a canon of Latin American visual culture has formed around what has been made more available in the digital domain. This is also true for printed texts, such as those digitized for Google Books. Any library that has not provided access to Google Inc. will have considerably less traffic, which affects current and future research. This could then profoundly alter the production of knowledge about Latin American colonial history and art, as well as the cultural heritage of the many peoples and countries who have a connection to it. In my viceregal art class, this was certainly the case. Students tended to rely primarily on sources that could be found online, such as e-books through the university’s library portal, Google Books, the Getty Research Portal, or the John Carter Brown Library.
Open access to knowledge and to visual materials are important, and the immediacy they afford us has the potential to upset problematic aspects facing the academy (such as budget cuts, less time to travel, and the increase in adjunct labor) and the destruction or loss of cultural heritage. But who gets to grant this access? And should all knowledge and imagery be made more accessible? Risam (2018) and Afanador Llach (2019) rightly remind us that the notion that information is and should be free is an assumption of the Global North, one that does not necessarily accord with Indigenous communities of the Global South. Even universal access to the Web is, as Rodríguez-Ortega states, a myth [2013a, 131; see also 2018]. A huge portion of the world’s population is still without access to the internet, and it is worth reflecting how the digital practices we engage in could potentially further this digital divide.
The issue of access is also one of language. English is the lingua franca of the Web,
which can be another barrier for anyone who does not know or use English
Final issues that warrant discussion are collaboration, image design and
manipulation, and the labor involved in creating digitized materials or DAH projects.
In the classes on viceregal art described above, each team crafts their own Omeka
exhibition, with the team designing a theme and an introductory statement that frames
each individual’s entries.
After our discussion about metadata and how to create it, another assignment asks
teams to decide on their exhibition’s theme after visiting a local museum collection
of Spanish colonial art, such as LACMA’s. Students are asked to photograph their
chosen objects that will form the core of their individual component. Before they
observe objects on display at the museum, I initiate a conversation about what these
photographs could or should look like, how many they might take, and whether the
photos might need to be I’ve never been asked before [in an art history
class] to consider how I take photos or what I might need to do to make them look
beautiful.
This discussion inevitably returns us to the importance of how
we frame or reframe art, how digital images shift the production of knowledge and our
understanding of colonial Latin American art, and how the choices we make to show or
not to show specific aspects of an object or building can alter how someone
understands it. We watch a Smarthistory video to discuss how the visual choices made
in it might affect how we understand a specific work of art and how the visuals
create an argument.
To provide a brief example, one team framed their exhibition around sacred imagery. One student chose Arellano’s
During the peer review process, this student’s component was met with both wonder and anxiety by his fellow teammates. They were concerned that his images were of such high quality so as to make their own individual essays look less legitimate or less serious. Most students took photos on their smartphones and had not manipulated them; they were blurry, dark, and crooked, and some had not captured portions of the object itself. The team member with high-quality photographs offered to share his expertise but wondered if the time he spent helping his teammates to improve their resulting digital images would negatively impact his own project because he would have less time to focus on it.
In the end, the process prompted an unexpected but important conversation about how
digitized images affect our perceptions of digital projects and about the labor
involved in creating them. I was reminded of Daniela Bleichmar’s discussion of
colonial Latin American art and visual epistemology, or the role
of visuality as a way of knowing, and the process of observation, collecting,
representation, and circulation that were integral to the production of
knowledge
[2015, 240]. Pairing
Bleichmar’s essay with the work they were doing in class proved especially
generative, with students finding compelling parallels between processes and projects
of the past with those in their digital present. Importantly, it also encouraged
students to revisit online projects that we had discussed in class to think
critically about how the material is presented and how this creates a digital and
visual argument. It also stimulated a great deal of dialogue about the need for more
accessible high-resolution images of colonial Latin American visual culture, a point
that the questionnaire’s respondents repeatedly emphasized.
Another important point the above example illuminates is the labor involved in
digitization, whether of books or images, or in digital work, such as working
collaboratively. A great deal of labor goes uncited, unnoticed, as has been addressed
more recently by many working in the Digital Humanities (e.g. Keralis 2016; Graban, Marty,
Romano, and Vandergrift 2019]. In her written reflection, a student pointed
out that the invisibility of this labor calls to mind the invisibility of labor used
to create the art and architecture of the sixteenth-century Spanish Americas. Even
when the creator of digital content is known, such as the photographer who took
certain photos and made them available on Flickr Commons, there is a great deal of
labor that might go unaccounted for. Image manipulation can be time consuming, and to
get it
Creating metadata and making an [Omeka] exhibit were totally new
experiences for me. . . . Both processes made the art [of the Spanish Americas]
far more accessible to me and help[ed] me develop better critical thinking skills
about what I see online. . . . They also made me feel uncomfortable because I
think my generation just assumes all stuff online is true, even when teachers tell
us it isn’t. But now I kinda get it.
This statement, in a student’s final
reflection, sums up much of what I have been discussing here and the relationship
between the digital, colonial Latin American art, and pedagogy. As is clear from this
class project, digital art history can disturb and disrupt how students approach
colonial Latin American art. As I hope this essay demonstrates, while the digital
turn offers many positive ways in which we can rethink and reframe art history and
specifically the visual culture of colonial Latin America, it seems mindful to be
wary of the notion that it can create a false perception of a techno-utopia in which
all creators and users are equal, and information is always readily accessible and
objective.
I dedicate this essay to Linda Rodriguez, who passed from this life too soon. She offered excellent feedback on this essay early on, for which I am so grateful. I also thank Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Clayton McCarl, and the two DHQ peer reviewers for their helpful feedback. Any errors are my own.
This essay was written in the spring and summer of 2018.
DigitalArt History?