Edited by Anna Bentkowska and Hazel Gardiner

ISSN 1742-3376

In the last newsletter I disclosed the sad news of CHArt’s final severing of its links with Birkbeck College, University of London. This was owing to various members of the CHArt committee leaving for other institutions or situations. One of the incidental benefits of this diaspora is that Hazel, CHArt Committee member and lynchpin, having left Birkbeck, now works at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King’s College, London. With all due respect to Birkbeck and gratitude for its generosity in allowing us to run CHArt as a kind of unofficial Birkbeckian project, King’s and the CCH are a completely different prospect. As members of our community will be aware King’s has long been one of the (if not the) leading institutions in humanities computing, and CCH, under the directorship of Harold Short, has been instrumental in many of the major projects and endeavours in this area.

Hazel, and fellow CHArt Committee member Neil Grindley, are working for the AHRC ICT Methods Network, which is according to its website, ‘a major new initiative which provides a national forum for the exchange and dissemination of expertise in the use of ICT for Arts and Humanities research across the whole range of subjects covered by the AHRC. It focuses on new developments and advanced methodologies, research processes, questions, and methods’. Though Hazel and Neil are working for the CCH and the Network as themselves, rather than as members of the CHArt Committee, it is nevertheless exciting that we have members working in such an important area, and it is to be hoped that CHArt will benefit from these connections.

Hazel and Neil’s move to CCH seems, to me at least, to be indicative of a more general trend and the importance of the concerns that inspired CHArt to be formed in the first place, and have kept it going since, becoming far more appreciated. That the AHRC has funded a large-scale endeavour such as the Methods Network means that, at long last, the bodies that run higher education in the humanities in the UK are waking up to the central importance of ICT. Other examples of this (and there are many I could cite) include the increasing appreciation by galleries such as Tate of the importance of the digital domain, evinced by the formation of their Digital Programmes department, and its continuing success under the direction of Jemima Rellie, and the founding of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, a ‘UK national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities’, in particular the sections devoted to performing arts and visual arts.

It is with pleasure therefore that I am able to announce that Jemima Rellie, and AHDS Visual Arts director Mike Pringle have both agreed to become new members of the CHArt committee, along with Tim Ayers, lecturer in the History of Art, Secretary of the British Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA), and a member of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, and a student member Francesca Franco, who is researching the history of the curation of network art for a Ph.D. at Birkbeck. With these additions to our already talent-packed committee and the increasing interest more generally in the relationship between digital technology and visual culture, CHArt looks set for an exciting few years in the near future, particularly with the prospect of more events like the successful round table held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) during our last conference, for which the committee and I owe a big thanks to David Ehrenpreis who both organised it and chaired.

Charlie Gere

The programme kicked off with a very engaging and informative address by Jemima Rellie. What stood out, for me, is how the role of Head of Digital Programmes at Tate seems far more holistic that that of many other curators and organisers – of exhibitions, interpretations, public relations, archives, education, and so on – whose roles can become very specialised and atomised. Unlike them, she seems to have the opportunity to be hands on at all stages, from the acquisition or commissioning of digital works, to exhibiting and archiving them, including curating the Tate website, which is by now as important a place to visit as the galleries.

Over the two days, the conference addressed topics from theatre and frescoes in ancient Pompei, to the future of paperless books; filing systems as art, and the filing systems that would enable a global slide library; digital installations moving around the back of an old Renault van (in David Furnham’s project Les Cyclistes), or mapping the movement of people across university foyers (in Elizabeth Coulter-Smith’s work); recreating spaces that were once real but are now gone, and the realism of virtual spaces that were never meant to correspond to a physical reality. As with all the best conferences, connections and relevance popped up where least expected. To give one example, John Pollini and Nicholas Cipolla gave a paper, towards the beginning of the conference, about using Virtual Reality software to enable undergraduate students to make their own reconstruction of the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome; this resonated again during a paper in the last slot of the programme, by Hamid van Koten, on the pleasures and perils of ever-increasing realism in computer games. Afterwards, many in the audience were having similar fantasies about game-like programmes that would combine all the fun of a SIMS ‘Nightlife’ extension pack, with an archaeologically accurate ancient Roman virtual setting. Instead of getting to choose what sort of furniture your virtual characters would live in, you get to decide what décor Emperor Augustus intended to be buried in. Sessions of WooHoo (SIMS parlance for recreational sex) would be awarded if you could justify your choices according to a sound evaluation of the primary and secondary evidence.

Halfway through the conference we moved to the more high-tech surroundings of the ICA for a round-table discussion about sharing archives of images over the Internet, a topic that ran through several of the papers and demonstrations over the two days. This is where the debate got heated, as positions and interests varied. Educators argued for a free (or at least cheap), good quality, reliable service that could provide not only a global image bank for lecturers and students, but could also nurture the intellectual tools students need to find, read and use images cogently and intelligently. Archivists seemed caught between the lure of ever-increasing image quality from high-definition scans, and the cost of making them (in hardware, skilled work and time), storing them and making them available – and the problem of the end-user and the capacity of his or her computer to receive and use ever-larger files? In the meantime, museum curators worried about ownership and fair use of images, while the tangled mess of unfathomable and seemingly unworkable copyright laws cast a confusing spell over the whole debate. There must be a way to find a useful, workable compromise between the need to keep up with constantly improving, expensive technology and preventing resources from becoming obsolete; and the temptation to use bootleg compilations of images available freely via Google, but of extremely variable quality and sometimes dubious provenance. After the round-table discussion, an e-mail list was circulated, with a view to convening a discussion group working on the topic of a universal image-bank for art historians. Perhaps at the next CHArt conference there might be some more concrete proposals to discuss and think about.

Much curiosity and questioning was generated when Simon Downs from Loughborough University School of Art and Design, announced, although could not yet demonstrate with a prototype, the era of the paperless book. The book is to be made from a wafer-thin, lightweight, portable ‘screen’ charged with an e-ink capable of reconfiguring electronic text into a succession of virtual pages that may be turned, leafed through, and annotated just like a real book, pre-downloaded using its microscopic, low energy consumption memory. Is this, rather than print-on-demand, the future of e-publishing? If the paperless book catches on, one will remember hearing of it first at a CHArt conference!

My personal highlight came at the end, in the artist Ralph Nuhn’s presentation of his own work. He makes installations which critique notions of computer-human interfaces. In his more recent work, he plays up the absurdity of machines communicating with each other, and of fetishising virtual space, by using computer connectors to set up impossible networks between domestic objects such as toasters, or to stand-in for the trace of the artist’s hand in a parody of Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases.

Patrizia Di Bello

The CHArt 2005 conference, held at the British Academy in November 2005, again provided an opportunity to catch up with advances in the application of computers to the understanding of art history; to see how artists use computers as part of art works; and of course to meet up with old friends and colleagues. The theme this year, Theory and Practice, gave an opportunity for a wide range of speakers to show how computer technologies can support the development of art theories and be used in the practice of creating art.

The keynote address was given by Jemima Rellie from Tate. Her opening remarks encompassed the main themes of the conference, stating that computers provided an increasing range of research tools as well as becoming an integral part of artworks, and offering new means of distributing reproductions of works, research output and other educational materials.

The first session focused on how digital technologies and the theories associated with them could be used to create art works. A presentation from Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith provided a fascinating insight into the use of positioning systems, such as satellite-based global positioning systems and aircraft tracking systems, to create spatially-based art works. This was followed by Francis Halsall’s discussion of systems-based art using systems, communications and information theories. Again it was interesting to see how science and technology were stimulating artistic creation.

In session 2 the focus shifted dramatically to the use of computers in art history education. Two papers discussed the use of three-dimensional computer modelling to explore, understand, research and present ancient art and architecture. Hugh Denard provided an insight into how such computing technology was being used to recreate and study Pompeian frescos with a view to understanding the theatre of the time. John Pollini and Nicholas Cipolla followed with a review of the work which had been carried out by students to reconstruct virtually the mausoleum of Augustus in Rome. The main thrust of their work was on ambiguity and incompleteness of evidence and how different interpretations of material may be represented within the virtual model. It was particularly interesting to see how computers might help in the educational process: both presentations showed how interactivity carries the potential to create a challenging and rewarding learning experience.

A short presentation on EDiNA, a national datacentre for digital resources for tertiary education in the UK, was given during the lunch break. The emphasis was on the arts. This introduction provided a complimentary view to the later presentations of ARTStor and MDID on the second day.

Session 3 started with David Furnham’s Les Cyclistes, looking at a forthcoming touring arts event using a mixture of media approaches to the cycling culture in the UK and France. This session concluded with Dew Harrison’s review of archiving as an art practice and the complexities of managing art-related materials created on or transferred to new digital media.

Session 4 involved a new feature at this year’s conference – a round-table debate of the issues around copyright and open access to images for educational purposes. The debate was vigorous, challenging and thought provoking. It tied in well with the presentations on ARTstor and MDID on day 2.

Day 2 started with Ann-Sophie Lehmann’s paper discussing artists’ approaches to presenting their New Media art and the degree to which such media lend themselves to being recorded whilst being created. This was followed by Max Marmor’s informative discussion on ARTstor, an online repository for digital images of art and resources available to educational establishments in the USA, similar to EDiNA.

In session 6 David Ehrenpreis presented another view on sharing digital content in an open source context and the challenges (technical and legal) of building an extensive image library for educational purposes. It was clear through the presentations on ARTstor, EDiNA and MDID, and the roundtable discussion, that the educational benefits of online image galleries and other research material are enormous, but that many obstacles remain in developing such widely available and free resources. It also made me quite envious of some of the resources that are available, but not in the UK, and not to individual users owing to access and copyright restrictions. This session concluded with a paper by Stephen Partridge. He observed the convergence between different media and different art forms. He also examined the impact of media terminology upon the language, including the evolution of such terms as ‘video’ which has different meanings in different contexts. As one medium emerges and compliments or converges with another, the relationship between simulation and substitution is affected. This is particularly relevant when one thinks about how to package content so that it can be ‘delivered’ through a variety of different channels with minimum changes.

Session 7 began with Simon Downs’s presentation on the development of an electronic book. His paper gave a brief overview of the history of the electronic book, the failure of past attempts and recent developments in display technology and software aiming to create a new, more practical and easy to read hand-held device. Modern commuters will agree that a good electronic reader the size of a paperback book cannot come soon enough! This very practical application of digital technology contrasted with Hamid van Koten’s paper on the tensions between reality and simulated environments and the effects of the digital environment.

The concluding paper of the conference was presented by Ralf Nuhn and focused on the use of technologies (analogue and digital, mechanical and electronic) as art works and the impact they had on the spectator. In his presentation video was used to illustrate how various art works tested the spectator’s senses and reactions and to show how observers may be encouraged to interact with art.

The mixture of diverse yet complimentary papers illustrated again the value computers and their associated technologies bring to the study, creation, presentation and appreciation of art. They also showed how science, technology and art can interact in constructive and stimulating ways. As a result, this conference left one with much to think about.

Nick Silburn

How do we set about ‘democratising the image’ was the question posed by David Ehrenpreis at a special session of the CHArt 2005 conference convened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The question was enthusiastically adopted by the conference delegates and other interested members of the audience. The CHArt committee would like to extend its thanks to David Ehrenpreis for suggesting, organising and chairing what turned out to be a very productive and enlivening discussion.

The jumping-off point for the session, as set out by the Chair, was that the technological means are in place to share images across institutional and national boundaries; so what is stopping individuals involved with education from easily getting hold of the images they need? At face value, this is – of course – a naïve question bearing in mind the enormous amount of time and energy that many organisations and agencies have devoted to answering this many-faceted conundrum over the years; but it is precisely the type of question that does need to be re-stated periodically to test how the various strands of the debate are converging or diverging. Ultimately, the most interesting outcome of this round-table session was the chance to hear practitioners verbalise currently-held views on the component topics encapsulated by this question. All present had an opportunity to consider whether the existing model of image use and delivery that they had in their minds was still plausible.

Institutions gain considerable incremental awareness of digital image issues at the same time that users are empowered by a plethora of technological solutions which enable them to acquire images more easily. This dichotomy was the first thing discussed by the panel and it is clearly a hugely important element in the debate. Charlie Gere kicked the discussion off by spelling out the idea that many lecturers who need to use images will simply find the best image they can on the web, will download it using whatever method is possible and may not worry overly about the quality, who owns the copyright and whether there are any reliable metadata to accompany the image! As a practice, this will undoubtedly continue to be the case for an enormous number of educators across many academic disciplines for the foreseeable future. However, for a community interested in promoting professional standards, procedures and practices, it is difficult to endorse such ad hoc methods and the discussion that followed attempted to formalise the problems involved with image curation and acquisition.

Something of a divide quickly appeared amongst panel members. The constituencies broke down into those with an interest in getting hold of images and those with a responsibility for managing images in an institutional context or with a remit to deliver financial returns on those resources. This predictable collision of interests was offset however by the representatives of both the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery emphasising that the promotion of free access to images (and other associated information) was an integral part of their institutional strategy, albeit one that had – by necessity – to run alongside charging models that would be applicable in certain circumstances. In this context, copyright and the Creative Commons licensing system were discussed and became a thread picked up at various points throughout the session.

Inevitably, the discussion touched on many themes but definitively answered very few of them. The kind of questions that remained open-ended were: what is ‘educational’ or ‘fair use’; what sort of access to images is required and by whom; is discussion of resolution standards a red herring; what are people actually searching for; who chooses what is digitised; who really pays for these resources in the first place and what constitutes an image. One question that did seem to be resolved was whether it was actually worthwhile going to the trouble of charging reproduction fees and did it actually make any money for the relevant institution. A resounding ‘yes’ and an accompanying figure from the Tate Gallery for their revenue from sales of reproduction rights would seem to suggest, at least from the perspective of certain organisations, that this discussion has plenty of life left in it!

The more general themes that emerged from the session, sometimes alluded to rather than actually developed, are what might ultimately be of most value to the communities involved with the image. Whether there needs to be any such thing as a ‘global learning community’ is surely up for grabs; as is the exact nature of the proposed paradigmatic shift that has taken place in the study of the visual arts and the nature of the image itself. The increasing convergence between the objectives of those who ‘keep’ the images and those who ‘use’ the images is surely worth monitoring and ultimately, David Ehrenpreis’ suggestion that ‘fear and greed’ are the base motives that stop institutions ‘democratising’ their images is a wonderfully contentious starting point for any similar discussion in the future.

The use of the ICA as an alternative location for this particular session was widely judged to have enhanced the nature of this event and it was agreed that similar occasions for taking delegates out of the normal conference space for one or more sessions would be sought in future. That said, the Committee’s thanks go also to the British Academy who provided the elegant venue for the rest of the proceedings and to all speakers and delegates who made both the round-table discussion and the rest of the conference so successful.

Neil Grindley

The AHRC ICT Methods Network has kindly sponsored three student delegates at the 2005 CHArt Conference. The students report here on their experience.

Thanks a lot for the Methods Network bursary and again, congratulations! The papers were very relevant to my current work. The locative media paper in particular provided me with a great deal of useful information on a topic crucial to my PhD and my own practice.

One of the most useful aspects of the conference was making contact with the speakers and other delegates. As I speak German and have a strong relationship with the German-speaking cultural scene, it was very enriching to meet people from Ars Electronica and from the University of Heidelberg. We exchanged contact details and will hopefully keep in touch.

The conference had a strong emphasis on art history, a field in which I am not particularly strong, but looking at computer art from an art historical perspective helps locate the debate about the digital image within the wider field of the visual culture. This is an interesting perspective. 

I am very thankful that I could participate. As a matter of fact, I think it was a great privilege for me and I felt honoured: I was the only Latin American there, as far as I know!

Luis Sotelo, University of Northampton

I am grateful to the AHRC ICT Methods Network for giving me the opportunity to attend the CHArt conference. I am enrolled as a part-time PhD student at Birkbeck College and I support my studies by working part-time in Cambridge. Without the support of the AHRC ICT Methods Network Student Bursary that covered travel expenses, accommodation and conference fees, I would have not been able to attend this important two-day event in London, which turned out to be particularly useful for my PhD research.

The issues addressed by the conference were important and relevant to my research. The main focus of my research is the analysis of the implications of digital technology and digital art on museum space and the study of the relations between digital art works and their role in museums, exhibitions, international events and annual festivals. In this respect participating in the CHArt conference represented a great opportunity to me to meet and talk to a number of speakers who focus their research on the use of digital technology in the field of art history.

The round-table discussion organised at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and moderated by David Ehrenpreis was extremely interesting too. Key concepts such as online copyright, open content and Creative Commons were addressed during the open forum. The opportunity to listen to a diverse range of experts (artists, educators, curators) and to interact with them during the two-hour discussion was very stimulating and it helped me in developing ideas that enrich my own work.

Francesca Franco, Birkbeck College, London

I had previously been aware of CHArt and the annual conferences; however I was never able to attend as I could not afford to do this. I was informed about the AHRC ICT Methods Network Bursary through an email forwarded to me by another research student, and having just commenced my PhD research, it provided me with a great opportunity.

CHArt is particularly relevant to my research, both from the point of view of my knowledge of computer art history gained through my MA, and my PhD research relating to computational intelligence and art history.

It was very useful for me to have the opportunity to speak to academics and practitioners as, in addition to learning about their particular fields and backgrounds, they were a further source of motivation for me in this early stage of my research. It was also interesting to note the different styles and ways in which professionals presented their research findings which I may be able to draw upon in the course of my research and beyond.

Simone Gristwood, Lancaster University

1986 was the year when ‘the standard desk-top computer provided between 30 and 40 MB’; ‘networking out of standard desk-tops was becoming the norm’, and ‘the much loved floppy disk was suspected to be on the way out for anything other than loading software’. CHArt Newsletter No. 6 (1987) which is the source for this account, reported with considerable enthusiasm the convenience of mobile computing offered by the new Cambridge z88 laptop from Sir Clive Sinclair. Of A4 size and weighing less than 2lbs this ‘forerunner of the personal digital assistants’ (see photograph and further details) promised ‘something that disappears into a briefcase and can be used in a library’. Z88 was used for word processing and spreadsheets (the latter described as databases). Both applications were problematic. WordPerfect was taking over WordStar at the time, but converting text documents from one format to another required additional software. The fact that WordPerfect did not have italics, and the ‘database’ software only allowed up to 42 records, is indicative of the then available technology. Z88 had other problems too, the major drawback being a screen that displayed only eight lines of text at a time. ‘It took some getting used to, but was not impossible’.

A major development in digital imaging came with the videodisc system that opened to public at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 1986. In September 1987, the CHArt Secretary (name not given) was shown the entire system by the project manager René-Pierre Slimane and published a detailed account of the visit: 4,000 out of 16,000 images selected from the museum’s collection had been digitised from both flat reflectance copy and large format transparencies. The scanning process was difficult and involved complex calculation of colour depth (24-bit image was reduced to 15-bit; one bit was left for RGB compensation or controlling software if necessary). Topaz software manufactured in Britain by Primagraphics was used and the system ran on VAX 11/785. The images were corrected for colour and contrast and stored on 1GB optical discs. The discs were linked into a daisy-chain and this made the retrieval slow. Hopes for larger storage media and the possibility of scanning at a higher resolution were already expressed before the completion of the project.

A room was dedicated for public terminals with separate menu-driven displays for adults and children. The adult display used two monitors: one to display an image and the other to display the accompanying catalogue entry. The limited search facilities allowed the catalogue material to be queried to find a number of paintings by the same artist. The retrieval time for an image was about six seconds but extended considerably if the same image was put in a queue when requested simultaneously by a number of users. The quality of 1000 x 1000 pixel images was assessed as ‘not high’. The reviewer was also critical of scanning errors, bad cropping and framing, and poor calibration of the monitors. The system compared unfavourably with the University of Iowa videodisc project demonstrated a year earlier at the CHArt 1986 conference. ‘The innovation of the d’Orsay system was that it existed; that it has found its way from a dream, across the drawing board into the public domain’ the report concludes. The system was eventually dismantled and years later replaced with a multimedia centre sponsored by Hewlett-Packard.

A videodisc published in 1990 is the remaining (obsolete?) record of the pioneering project. The videodisc by André Hatala and Caroline Mathieu offered a g uided tour of select paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture and other art works, a total of sixty minutes of moving images and some 11,000 frames of still images.

Undeterred by technical limitations, the quest for better imaging capabilities in both hardware and software continued. Characteristically, developments were followed internationally and reported back to CHArt’s constituencies. It seems that the focus on things to come, rather than current technological constraints, has always been a driving force for CHArt activities. At the recent round-table discussion hosted by CHArt at the ICA in November 2005 (see the reviews above) many of today’s concerns about the use and global dissemination of digital images were voiced and possible solutions explored. In this context it seems only proper to look back and to be encouraged by the progress made over the last twenty years. The technical constraints of the 1980s are today negligable, the problems we are facing lie elsewhere.

Anna Bentkowska

Bridgeman Art Library

In the summer of 2005 the Bridgeman Art Library has announced the launch of Bridgeman Education (www.BridgemanEducation.com) an educational image resource for scholars and academics across a broad spectrum of faculties. The database offers instructors and students a flexible way to access and use art-historical and cultural imagery ranging from prehistory to the present day. 200,000 images are sourced from over 8000 locations which include the world’s major museums, art collections and historical sites.

Drawing from the vast holdings of The Bridgeman Art Library’s own archive, Bridgeman Education is a subscription-based, annually renewable website permitting the institution’s staff and enrolled students to draw upon the resource for organising lectures, compiling course packs, presentations, or for study. The emphasis is on simplicity, rapid access and organisation. There is no requirement to use proprietary software, the service complements the educator’s or student’s own software or organisational methods for storing and retrieving imagery. One may browse through images by using subject categories; keywords have been developed in conjunction with educational institutions specifically for the academic user. Visual cultures of a huge range of civilizations, from the Aztecs to the Egyptians or the Tang Dynasty, are represented. The material extends far beyond art and design being appropriate for faculties such as literature and drama, classical civilization, music, politics, archaeology and anthropology, architecture, geography and science and social history. Specialised search, display and save functions enable users to create their own interactive slide presentations for classroom use. New and unfamiliar pictures complement standard art history textbooks, ensuring lively and innovative lectures.

Bridgeman Education reflects over 30 years of specialist art-historical knowledge and experience. It was developed after two years of intensive consultation with academic professionals, professors and students, therefore ensuring that its features are as responsive to their needs as possible. The collection is evolving with the addition of new material on a daily basis, ensuring users the most varied and eclectic range of imagery.

In addition to the website resource, Bridgeman Education’s own art history experts are on-hand to create tailor-made image sets on CD-ROMs to maximise visual learning for any given course program or lecture series, as well as offer research advice. Alternatively, various pre-prepared CD-ROMs containing specific periods of art history can be ordered. Digitisation of the images from the college slide library is also possible as an additional service.

To subscribe, visit the Bridgeman Education website or or e-mail trials@bridgemaneducation.com for further information on our subscription service and to register for a free trial.

ARTstor: an Update - Max Marmor

ARTstor is a digital library initiative launched in April 2001 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; it became an independent not-for-profit organization in January 2004 and launched a live service in July of that year. ARTstor is now licensed by libraries by more than 500 universities, schools and museums in the U.S. and Canada, and ARTstor is actively planning further international distribution, with pilot distributions now underway in the UK and Australia/New Zealand.

ARTstor’s name alludes to the project’s principal domain – the arts – as well as its sibling relationship with JSTOR. Like JSTOR, which creates, “stores” and distributes comprehensive digital archives of the backfiles of core journals in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences, ARTstor will create (or assemble), “store” and distribute digital images of visual materials that are central to teaching and learning in art history and the humanities. Again like JSTOR, in performing these services ARTstor seeks to advance and progressively transform the ways in which scholarship, teaching and learning are conducted, and the ways in which library collections and services evolve. The audience of both initiatives is strictly non-commercial and educational and, like JSTOR, ARTstor functions as an independent non-profit – and mission-driven – organization.

The ARTstor Digital Library is being developed simultaneously on several fronts. On the one hand, ARTstor seeks to create digital research corpora that will facilitate and advance scholarship in the history of art. An example is a complete digital version of The Illustrated Bartsch, a monumental 100-volume reference work that offers more than 55,000 digital images derived from Old Master European prints from the 15 th to the 19 th century. In a tandem effort, ARTstor just beginning to digitize the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings, a renowned but relatively inaccessible photographic archive that reproduces more than 185,000 old master drawings from scores of museums and archives. High resolution images of the ca. 17,000 drawings from the British Museum will be among the first fruits of this ambitious project. Another project will create a digital version of 30,000 photographs from Harvard University’s Image of the Black in Western Art research archive.

While pursuing these and other ambitious digitization projects, ARTstor has also sought to create core teaching “canons” in a range of fields, including among others the arts of Asia and America, the history of western architecture, etc. Underlying and embracing these focused collections of teaching images is a broad “Image Gallery” that offers a broad and deep compendium of more than 250,000 images, crafted around common teaching needs in art history and related disciplines. Drawing on multiple sources, this Image Gallery is meant to be the digital equivalent of a large teaching slide library.

Being shaped around common curricula, the Image Gallery should advance the transition from slides to digital images in art history instruction, while also relieving many academic institutions and visual resources collections of the need to digitize their own slide collections in support of the core image needs of art history teachers. At the same time, the Image Gallery should provide scholars, teachers and students in fields outside the arts – scholars who have typically lacked slide and photograph archives, let alone digital collections – with the beginning of a “campuswide” visual resource.

This brief update summarizes a paper presented at the 2005 CHART conference. A fuller version will be made available online in due course as part of the proceedings of that conference.

Prometheus - Hubertus Kohle

Prometheus (Director Holger Simon) is an online meta-database of existing picture databases on the Internet. The project is based at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität in Cologne and was developed with contributions from Art History and Archaeology departments in German Universities. Prometheus integrates a number of different image databases and at present holds 285,000 images. For copyright reasons, the material is password protected, and there is also a fee payable to access the images. Universities pay 2000 Euros, individual institutions between 300 and 900 Euros (depending on the size). 29 databases are now included (no restrictions to further enlargement), and it is hoped that Prometheus will continue to grow. Risks are low, as the database is simply a superstructure for individual databases. This also allows for single procedure requests so that one request covers all the databases included. So if there are copyright problems, a contributor may withdraw a submitted database. Prometheus is looking to include further international databases as part of its holdings.

Yearbooks and Proceedings

The text for CHArt Yearbook vol. 2 Futures Past has been submitted to the publisher, Intellect and is being reviewed; publication is scheduled for November 2006.

CHArt Yearbook vol. 1 (2005) Digital Art History. A Subject in Transition: Exploring Practice in a Network Society, is available for purchase. See the table of contents and order form.

Computing and Visual Culture: Representation and Interpretation, a selection of papers presented at the 1998 CHArt Conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London is still available. See the table of contents and order form.

We also have a number of back issues of CHArt journals from 1990-1998.

Online publications

There are six volumes of CHArt conference proceedings from 1999-2004 available on the CHArt website, comprising 63 papers by 89 contributors.

Back issues of the CHArt Newsletter 2003-2005 are also available.