A Historian goes to CAA (College Art Association)

#thatcamp next up @ProfessMoravec comes out as as...historian.
— Kelly Quinn (@Kelly_Quinn_23) February 11, 2014

I was delighted to be invited to That Camp CAA to share Visualizing Schneemann  Anne Swartz and Michelle Millar Fisher did an amazing job bringing together a diverse group of people at Columbia College Chicago, which took me back to my first job teaching at Otis College of Art and Design (I almost cried when a student asked me in the elevator what class I was teaching).   

I loved hearing about so many different art historical applications of digital humanities.  It was a swell two days although Chicago was seriously cold for this So Cal native.   The conversation revolved around the crucial question, what do art historians, who have vast experience working with the visual, have to contribute to digital humanities (storify here).  Quite a lot, of course.  The two days defy easy summarization, and like most of the east coast, I’m stranded at home today, so I’m going to just give you some random highlights:

• hanging out with Margo Hobbs who I’ve known since the 90s when there were only like four of us total working on dissertations in feminist art and no one thought that was a very good idea.  We regaled the young folks with our reminiscences of listervs. 
• talking writing in public with the sparkly Charlotte Frost (aka Ph.D. to Publishing) who gave a presentation about art history that I finally just had to stop live tweeting, because would have been +1 for every slide she showed.
• meeting Jessica Landau and Melissa Seifert, fabulous graduate students from Learning to See Systems at UIC who did a great job soloing without their under the weather advisor Kevin Hamilton.  Their program is wonderfully interdisciplinary.  I was also pretty envious after lunching with Quint Gregory of UMD's Collaboratory.   Between those two things I almost wanted to go back to graduate school. 
• getting to talk DH party of 1 with Hussein Keshani, who is doing some seriously amazing work at UBC, Okanagan Campus

Huge thanks to Kelly Quinn of the Archives of American Art who has been such a wonderful supporter of my interloper work in art history for live tweeting my talk.

And massive kudos to Nancy Ross (@nancyross_ross) who schooled me in Mormon feminism and blew my mind with the transformative DH work she is doing in St. George Utah.