Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Mountain Daylight Time)

My paper will provide an overview of the main themes and selected key findings of my doctoral dissertation, ‘Creative Connections: the value of digital information objects and their effective management for sustainable contemporary visual art practice’. This study provides a novel analysis of visual art making in the UK.

Based on evidence derived from a series of detailed qualitative case-study interviews, the research clarifies the value of digital information use in contemporary visual art practice in the UK and the current digital object management skills base in the visual art community. A practitioner-focused, qualitative methodology produces deep understanding of how artists spend their time and value particular resources in making their work.

The study findings provide an evidence base for the use of policy makers in the visual arts sector and for providers of education and training in the visual arts, with profound implications for the fit-to-need of current curricula in tertiary and professional art education. This study analyses and clarifies the extent to which the information sciences are reaching this profession, and how the professional art community may benefit from engagement with information science concepts and practices as a tool in the struggle to stay in practice.

Digital humanities (DH) have gradually developed into an interdisciplinary field and a “battleground” between different research methods and conventions. As increasing numbers of scholars entered the DH landscape from various knowledge domains, one central concern was how digital technologies influenced the landscape of DH, which scholars have discussed intensively but without achieving agreement. These theoretical discussions, however, did not provide empirical insight into the actual shape of DH under the technological influence. This dissertation study addresses this broad concern focusing on one specific, emerging DH practice, i.e., the visualization practice. Widely presented in research outputs and applied during research processes, visualization embodies cross-field collaborative practices among DH scholars and functions as an indicator for the field’s evolution. I take a Latourian approach to investigate how digital humanists, defined as any researchers or practitioners engaging in DH work, leverage visualizations as “immutable mobiles” to produce, transfer, and communicate humanities knowledge, both in research outputs and during the research process. I apply a sequential, explanatory mixed-methods design, quantitatively examining the use patterns of visual inscriptions in DH journal articles over the last ten years, then proceeding to the underlying, implicit decision-making processes and practices of visualization among digital humanists of.