Digital Visual Studies

Digital Visual Studies addresses questions that have arisen from developments in the digital humanities. Computer-aided processes increasingly determine the collection, management, and communication of research-related data – from sustained digitization of art historical sources and their automatized evaluation to formats of digital publishing. Considering the mediality of sources and tools, hitherto conventional conceptions of working in the humanities are changing. Apart from a reflection on these radical changes and their epistemological implications on the level of science history and theory, the Department encourages the acquisition and mediation of digital competences by introducing an extensive reorganization of the academic IT area at the Institute.
Digital Visual Studies (DVS) is also a research group of its own as a six-year cooperation project funded by the Max Planck Society (MPG) and hosted by the University of Zurich (UZH) as the Center of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (PhF) since January 2020. The project aims to expand Art History towards the Digital Humanities, modernize its methodologies, and contribute to forming a first generation of Digital Visual Humanists. The project is supervised by a PI (Tristan Weddigen), directed by a Scientific Coordinator (Darío Negueruela), and supplemented by an Executive Committee (Noah Bubenhofer, Tanja Michalsky). Digital Visual Studies supports and funds predoctoral, postdoctoral, and visiting fellows who work in the areas of visual, textual, and spatiotemporal research. The project seeks to foster avant-garde transdisciplinary research focused on methodological innovation and critical reflection in the field between computer vision and art history defined by its exploratory nature and driven by the research interests of its members in a bottom-up approach.