In our increasingly digital world, our viewing experience changes every day. Digital Humanities has made its way into visual culture and art history scholarship, and I am excited to learn about its history, critical debates, and implications for studying visual culture and art history. My methodology for my research will be to first study the field of Digital Humanities, then to work on my case study on the representation of food culture: this blog.
There is an ever-greater need for art historians and visual culture specialists to understand the definition of and acquire skills in Digital Humanities. In the largely visual and digital world we occupy today, our modes of visual engagement have transformed radically. Through my immersion in my major in Art History and Visual Culture at Denison University, I have been introduced to digital humanities, and am excited to study it in depth. I seek to examine questions about digital humanities and visual representation in the ten-week Young Scholar program with my mentors Professor Joanna Grabski and Megan Hancock. This research focuses on the significance of and implications for Digital Humanities in our largely visual world, working especially from the vantage points of art history and visual culture. Throughout my ten weeks of research, I plan on examining what Digital Humanities consists of, what its future implications are, how it maximizes our liberal arts education, why some are critical of it, and why Digital Humanities ultimately offers a bright future for innovative thinking about the construction of visual narratives. After examining Digital Humanities broadly, I focus on a case study about the visual representation and narativization of food culture (this blog). I will examine an intensive set of questions regarding how our food practices have become visualized and narativized because they are mediated by technology. This fascinating project will be the basis of my senior research, and it grows out of my interdisciplinary training in the liberal arts, my work in art history and visual culture, and an exploratory project I completed in Professor Joanna Grabski’s Representing Africa on Film class.