Source Criticism and Digitized Visual Culture: Tales from Digital Islamic Art History

Using case studies from working with research assistants on the projects Evolving the Botanic Garden and Model Images and from teaching graduate and undergraduate students to work with and produce digital media, this talk will consider what it means to practice art historical source criticism when working with digitized material culture, digital objects like 3D models and databases. These cases suggest that the historian in the digital age must become competent in interrogating the data model, data cleanliness, mutability, searchability, digital visuality, genealogy, certainty, and surrogacy.