VOA常速英语:艺术的数字技术历史

GIS, digital mapping has been around for decades. So it’s quite an old technology but it’s really only been applied to humanities relatively recently.
We do have large datasets that because of the developments in computer science and in regular standard computers, even laptops, have made this kind of work much easier for art historians.
We look at art history across all geographic locations, all spaces and times and across all media.
So, we are interested not only in the history of art objects as preserved in museums or historic houses, palaces, but also architectural history, archaeology.
All of this is to help make the object itself, the historical object, the spatial object, really much more comprehensible and better to interpret.

One of the great contributions of these kinds of digital art history projects is the ability to help us understand in a more rich and informed way how those art works that now exist perhaps in a museum were part of a larger complex three-dimensional setting.
It actually lets you think about how people lived in these spaces, moved through these spaces,
how artworks interacted and would have been seen and understood in relationship to one another in their original setting.
That’s a digital map where you have, you could search various points, so you could search, say, a thousand buildings in a city instead of one building in a city,
but it can also include 3d environments where you’re actually building up those architectural monuments.
You can see change over time, for example, how a building was constructed, sometimes over thousands of years. You can see changes to the site.
Who lived there? What were their professions? Were their children in the house?
You know, there’s lots of really granular data that is available in archives that, you know, can be applied to these digital maps,
and allow users to ask very new kinds of questions that would have been so challenging and so time-consuming using traditional archival research methods.
Many of our digital humanities projects work with space.
We’re working on very complex, archivally-based, very, very specific scholarly problems,
but they’re also trying to recreate environments that can then be explained to a much broader public.
Augmented reality really makes that possible where you can go into a city,
and you can use your phone or any kind of device,
and you can start to layer historical evidence or historical views or historical material onto that physical environment.
And I think by reflecting on the past and what these sites were like then, what we can see today,
I think it does sort of awaken in us a deeper understanding of how our own physical lived existence takes place amidst culture, amidst artworks,
and you know, hopefully, you know, it makes one, you know, more sensitive and thoughtful about those experiences that surround us at all times.