Valeria Federici
The Age of Datum in Art History or Data as a Methodological Paradigm
Data visualizations created by the author with Gephi, 2013
The appearance of data as a paradigm of art-historical analysis has altered methods of investigation. In 2011 Johanna Drucker proposed renaming information contained in data sets as capta (i.e., taken), rather than as data (i.e., given), in order to acknowledge the limits and implications of considering data as absolute values, divested of implicit meaning. At the same time, digital humanists and digital art historians constantly face technological obsolescence and computational end-of-life. Given these challenges and considerations, this research confronts, compares, and illustrates digital art-historical approaches and offers a theoretical investigation, drawn from media studies, of the implications of information technology and data as both methods and structures.