Kathryn Desplanque spoke on her core book project, “Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Market Economy for Art, 1750-1850,” which examines a corpus of 530 satirical images of artistic life in Paris published between 1750 and 1850. As she examined the evolution of artist typologies over time, she found that she needed a way to represent the corpus in its totality and store all the images, bibliographic information, and annotations / patterns without any information falling to the wayside. Desplanque shared how she used NVIVO, a qualitative data analysis software to create an “image thesauri” that allowed her to code specific regions in and link metadata around images, store bibliographic information in a classification sheet, and represent annotations in customizable, hierarchical nodes. In this database, Desplanque is able to search images and curate galleries based on metadata and nodes, as well as run queries to populate rows columns. Desplanque ended her talk by encouraging those in the humanities interested in data science to find a peer with literacy in both areas to act as a bridge and help translate their thinking and methods, and reminding those outside of her field that humanists are doing data science too.
Click here to view the talk on YouTube.
Kathryn Desplanque, Assistant Professor of 18th and 19th Century European Art
Department: Department of Art & Art History | Faculty Profile
Featured on: January 26, 2022 (Event Page)
Session Title: Series Kickoff: The Usual and Unusual Suspects (Event Recap)
Tools, Information, and Resources:
- NVivo | Qualitative Data Analysis Software: NVivo helps you discover more from your qualitative and mixed methods data. Uncover richer insights and produce clearly articulated, defensible findings backed by rigorous evidence.
- Setting the Art World Ablaze | Endeavors: Upon discovering a series of political cartoons mocking artists in 18th– and 19th-century France in 2010, UNC-Chapel Hill art historian Kathryn Desplanque couldn’t stop searching for them. Now, she has amassed more than 500 and is using them to redefine how we think about art and the artist in modern-day society.
- Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative: Catalyzed by a $1.39 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) represents a major university-wide commitment to the digital humanities. Its goal over the next five years is the development and testing of an adaptable and sustainable model of transformative academic practice that embraces faculty research and professional development, graduate and postdoctoral training, undergraduate learning, and engaged scholarship in the humanities.
- Digital Humanities Advancement Grants: The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The program also supports research that examines the history, criticism, ethics, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society.