Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, April 4, 2018 in Conferences, Digital Humanities, Events, HART, News, Technology, VRC.

In late March, I represented Vanderbilt’s History of Art Visual Resources Center at the Visual Resources Association’s 35th Annual Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This year’s conference theme was “Workshop of the World”, a theme which played on the nineteenth-century nickname for Philadelphia as an important center of industry.

The highlight of the conference was the engaging and inspiring keynote speech given by Jane Golden, longtime Executive Director of Mural Arts Philadelphia. Mural Arts Philadelphia is part social program, part art collaborative. Golden recounted the journey of the organization from its origin in the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network of the 1980s, to a small city agency in the 1990s, to its current place as the nation’s largest and most robust mural program. She emphasized the importance of civic engagement, delivering art to the public “as a civil service,” and the role of visual arts in community building and urban transformation.

Conference highlights included two sessions addressing the question of access: “Images for Scholarly Publication: Rights and Reproductions Perspectives“, in which representatives of several Philadelphia museums discussed how they make images of their collections available to researchers, publishers, and the broader public; and “Digital, Visual, Tactile: Expanding Access to Specialized Collections”, which focused on different methods of expanding the digital reach of physical collections that might otherwise be difficult to access.

As a participant in the conference’s poster session, I presented “Teaching Students to Visualize Art Historical Data with Tableau Public”. The poster addressed my recent foray into teaching a new data analysis and visualization tool to Professor Rebecca VanDiver’s fall 2017 course, Women in Art Since 1850. The poster was well-received, with many conference attendees expressing their interest in encouraging their own faculty members to incorporate similar digital tools in the classroom.

— Shelby Merritt

Shelby Merritt’s poster for the 2018 Visual Resources Association Conference, “Teaching Students to Visualize Art Historical Data with Tableau Public”