Clio Wired (History 696)

The Imaging the French Revolution site uses text and images and provides a model (for me) for combining text and images on the web. Jack Censer argues that "comparison between visual images on the web as web texts is still very underdeveloped." Yes, this is the great intersection between art history and history that I like but it also becomes a new, or at least changed,interdisciplinary approach because I think we are beginning to use web images as text in a different way than we did in the past.

We still need text to present historical background and art historians will still use Formal Analysis to understand the formal elements of the work. However, what the artist is doing with the formal elements themselves is creating text within the image to engage the viewer and to evoke a response.

The web is capable of doing the same thing for digital scholarship: it allows the reproduction of images that can be read as text when presented within the the historical context and I think it is a more accurate, and definitely, different approach than using a textbook with images. Personally, I hate looking at art in books. Perhaps, the web provides a better reality for looking at images when there is historical context as well.

I am not sure where I am going with these ideas but I seem to be working on an epiphany and will let you know what happens.