Architectural History and Digital Humanities

The EAHN interest group “Architecture History and Digital Humanities” aims to discuss emerging concepts and methodological capacities brought by new technologies for documenting, archiving, and researching the built environment.

In recent years, architectural histories have been challenged with new forms of digital data, such as non-canonical information about the built environment and large-scale datasets of images and planning documents, while at the same time there is a pressing need to maintain access to primary sources. These challenges have recently increased due to new technologies for processing this data. AI in particular poses problems that historians have rarely faced before. The aim of the group is to foster an interdisciplinary exchange on how this data is understood, collected, and processed, while reflecting on the specific contribution that architectural history can bring to the field of digital humanities, and vice versa.

Twinned disciplines have already assimilated digital humanities into their methodologies. Nowadays, many art historians are turning to the digitization of research resources, to their analysis via computational techniques, to the study of works of art and their museumization through virtual and augmented reality, and even to the application of network analysis to large bulks of images. This link between digital humanities methods and art history is being explored with increasing intensity in relevant conferences and publications: Association for Art History congresses delve into this topic in academic sessions, the Journal of Art Historiography has published a special issue on Digital Humanities, and edited collections such as The Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History (Brown, 2021) include renowned authors reflecting on the subject, proving its topicality and future potential.

Some of the issues to be addressed by the interest group are as follows: What are the new data sources at our disposal? How can architecture and urban historians employ methods of digital humanities? How do they confront traditional research methods? Can they be combined? What should our relation with Artificial Intelligence be? What new research questions in architecture and urban history may emerge when using new digital methods?

The group has contemporary relevance because it would bring architectural history on par with other related disciplines where emerging methods linked to new digital tools have already been assimilated. Scholars working on any period of the history of architecture, in any geographic area, and from any methodological perspective are welcome to participate in its activities.

The group will organize a number of thematic workshops within the framework of EAHN bi-annual meetings.