Overview & Identification

For this project, assigned in DHM 280 of spring 2023 by Randall Cream, at West Chester University, we were required to identify a discipline and analyze its relation to the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities. Our group selected Art, with a focus on the physical production of art, and then chose a tool, project, and publication to explore how this discipline aligns with the Digital Humanities. Below, you will see that we provided a description of our discipline and then also examined how the goals and values of Art connected to the Digital Humanities.

Defining the Discipline~ Art

Using Art, people are able to express themselves, providing a resulting product that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. Art is a very broad and subjective topic which can make it quite difficult to describe. Art can be the human creation of something, say, a painting, but it can also be the act of creating the said painting. Art encompasses many things including, but not limited to, visual arts (paintings, drawings, sculpture), architecture, theater, music, dance, literature, and film.

The Met 360° Project

The Met 360° Project, presented by The Met in NYC and directed by Nina Diamond, consists of 6 detailed videos that allow viewers to experience The Met’s art and architecture in a new and digitally immersive way. The project allows it’s viewers to have a 360° perspective on showcased art without the hassle of having other people in their line of sight. There is also an option to have a bird’s-eye view of the art presented and a time-lapse feature as well.

Tool

Total Cinema 360 was founded in the beginning of the cinematic boom. Adrian Vasquez de Velasco is one of the co-founders and creative directors of total cinema, along with Craig Gilbert. The goal of total cinema was to create a unique take on reality where the viewers felt dispersed in the images they were viewing. The creators defined their tool as “untapped potential of spatial and interactive audio and video, volumetric performance capture, photogrammetry, live theater, and the newest XR technologies (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality) to redefine the creative boundaries of cinematic storytelling.” 

Total Cinema 360 is a series of different cameras and lenses to create an immersive experience for the views. It combines high tech cameras and microphones along with wide angles to create the 360° effect, so that as a person is viewing something through total cinema they are able to be immersed in the actual elements sounding them and move their view as if they are actually standing in the space being photographed (as seen in the project we selected). The wide lenses allow the photographers to capture all angles and details in the surrounding space to create the full effect of being in the space.

This tool can be used in digital humanities to show different perspectives on things and also to be inclusive to everyone so that people can experience different places without having to actually go there. It is a very helpful and interactive tool, which has won many awards, that users can feel a part of different worlds and experience traveling to different places from the comfort of their homes.

The Digital Museum: Challenges and Solution

This article discusses the development of digital curation in cultural expression applications, such as museum and art gallery, focusing on the user experience perspective. The use of digital technology has improved the production process in conventional museum and art gallery and has greatly facilitated the interaction between viewers and collections. Although the concept of digital museum has attracted a lot of attention in the past decade, there remain many challenges to be addressed. In this paper, we discuss current progress in the development of digital museum and identify important factors that affect its successful deployment.

Yu-Chang Li, Alan Wee-Chung Liew and Wen-Poh Su, “The digital museum: Challenges and solution,” 2012 8th International Conference on Information Science and Digital Content Technology (ICIDT2012), Jeju, 2012, pp. 646-649.

Goals

One of the goals of the Art discipline is accessibility. People make and consume Art as a form of self-expression, to tell a story, to raise awareness, or just to entertain, which promotes the goal of accessibility by allowing people of all kinds to create and view Art any way they would like. The goal of The Met 360° Project is to make art accessible to everyone. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most popular museums in the world, and The Met 360° Project allows users to view the wonders of the museum anywhere, anytime, and for free. One of the goals of the Digital Humanities field is to make accessible cultural data, which The Met 360° Project is doing by making art accessible to all online.

Values

Art as a discipline has many different values, including enriching the human experience and mind, along with allowing one to express themselves and their thoughts freely and creatively. Arts values connect and in some cases overlap with those of the digital humanities. Art as a discipline shares the value of experimentation with DH. Experimentation is a value used and observed in art because as art is being physically created (whether it be a painting, video, poem) and many artists go through lots of trial and error while creating their work. This could result in changes or even in some cases an accident turned into art. (some examples shown below and in link above).

Evaluation & Conclusion

The field of Art aligns well with the field of Digital Humanities because both fields focus on creating and providing content that is accessible to everyone. The Met 360° Project was able to reach over 11 million viewers and has continued in being attainable to everyone. Both fields also value diversity, are open to the idea of collaboration, and are platforms where people can express themselves more candidly in a contemporary fashion. Art and Digital Humanities share the goal of experimentation as well, and allows the process to take artists to the final piece, rather than having a clear masterpiece in mind.

Meet Our Team!

Rachael

• Roles: Webpage builder, Coordinator, Evaluation & Conclusion, Digital Project

Isabella

• Roles: Description of Discipline, Digital Project, Scholarship, Goals of DH and Discipline

Emme

• Roles: Tools/Methods, Values of DH and Discipline, Report

Grace

• Roles: Overview and Identification of Context, Description of Discipline, Report

Nina

• Roles: Overview and Identification of Context, Teams, Slides