Alison Langmead holds a joint faculty appointment between the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches and researches in the field of the digital humanities, focusing especially on applying digital methods mindfully within the context of visual and material culture studies.
For the Department of Art History and Architecture, Alison serves as the Director of the Visual Media Workshop (VMW). The mission of the VMW is to develop and encourage the creation of innovative methods for producing, disseminating, and preserving the academic work using digital technologies as a fundamental component of our scholarly toolkit. To achieve these objectives, she directs a technologically-focused environment of collaboration and creativity where students and faculty from a number of departments across the University come together to work on projects that apply digital methods and techniques with focus and intention.
For the School of Computing and Information (SCI), Alison researches the relationship between the historical practice of information management and digital computing, both as a historical narrative and also as a complex, changing process in contemporary America. This research, plus all of the theories, concepts, and models that she teaches at SCI, are put into daily practice in her work directing the VMW.
In terms of teaching, Alison teaches courses in digital culture and the digital humanities, especially, but not exclusively, at the graduate level.
Alison is also the principal contact for the DHRX: Digital Humanities Research at Pitt initiative, which represents a transdisciplinary network of scholars here at the University of Pittsburgh who use digital methods to study the ways in which humans interact with their environments, whether social or cultural, natural or human-created.
- PhD, Columbia University
- MLIS, University of California at Los Angeles
Education & Training
- Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, May 2023
Langmead, Alison and Alison Stones. “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture and the Creation of the World Wide Web.” In Digital Medieval Studies: Experimentation and Innovation, edited by Sean Gilsdorf and Laura K. Morreale, 41-68. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2024.
Langmead, Alison, et al. “Network Analysis + Digital Art History: A Roundtable on a Collective Scholarly Experience.” The International Journal for Digital Art History 2021_22, no. 7 (May 3, 2024): https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/dah/article/view/90725
Langmead, Alison and Annette Vee. “Teaching the Digital Humanities to a Broad Undergraduate Population.” In What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, edited by Brian Croxall and Diane Jakacki, 26-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Langmead, Alison, Christopher J. Nygren, Paul Rodriguez, and Alan Craig. “Leonardo, Morelli, and the Computational Mirror.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2021): https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/15/1/000540/000540.html.
Langmead, Alison and David Newbury. “Pointers and Proxies: Thoughts on the Computational Modeling of the Phenomenal World.” In The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, edited by Kathryn Brown, 358-373. London: Routledge, 2020.
Ellenbogen, Josh and Alison Langmead. “Forms of Equivalence: Bertillonnage and the History of Information Management.” Technology and Culture 61, no. 1 (January 2020): 207-238.
Berg-Fulton, Tracey, Alison Langmead, Thomas Lombardi, David Newbury, and Christopher Nygren. “A Role-Based Model for Successful Collaboration in Digital Art History.” International Journal for Digital Art History 3 (2018): 152-80.
Langmead, Alison. “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities." The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy 12 (February 12, 2018).
Armstrong, Christopher Drew, Lily Brewer, Jennifer Donnelly, Alison Langmead, and Vibeka McGyver. “Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable.” Journal18, Special Issue “Coordinates” 5 (Spring 2018).
Birnbaum, David J. and Alison Langmead. “Task-Driven Programming Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities.” In New Directions for Computing Education: Embedding Computing across Disciplines, edited by Samuel B. Fee, Amanda M. Holland-Minkley, and Tom Lombardi, 63-85. New York: Springer, 2017.
Digital Projects
Teaching Art History with AI
Principal Investigator, Author, and Editor, 2023-2024
InfoEco Cookbook
Project Manager, Contributor and Editor, 2022
The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap
Principal Investigator, Researcher and Editor, 2015-2022
Itinera
Technical Director and Lead Project Manager, 2012-present
Grants Awarded
“Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture.” Higher Learning Program, The Andrew W Mellon Foundation, December 1, 2024-November 30, 2027.
Role: Co-Principal Investigator with Kirk Savage and Chris Nygren
“Teaching Art History with AI.” Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities Grant, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, October 2023-April 2024.
Role: Principal Investigator
“Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) From the Quantitative to the Digital Age.” Sawyer Seminar, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, September 2019-August 2022.
Role: Co-Principal PI with Lara Putnam and Annette Vee, University of Pittsburgh
“Workshops on Sustainability for Digital Projects.” Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grant, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, October 2018-September 2019.
Role: Principal Investigator
“Art History + Network Science: A Getty Advanced Workshop.” Digital Art History Grant, J. Paul Getty Foundation, April 2018-December 2021.
Role: Lead Principal Investigator with Co-PIs Anne Helmreich, Getty Research Institute and Scott Weingart, Carnegie Mellon University
Invited Talks
“Teaching Art History with AI.” Invited presentation offered alongside Kale Doyen and Hossein Nakhaei at the Computer Vision and Art History Today Symposium, organized by Elizabeth Mansfield of Penn State, and held at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 15, 2024.
“Considering AI: Its Potential as a Resource for Art Scholarship & Charitable Practice.” Invited keynote presented alongside David Newbury (Getty) for the Aspen Institute Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative, online, April 24, 2024.
“Sustainability in the Age of ‘Generative’ Computation.” Invited talk presented at the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 28, 2024.
“Artificial Intelligence, Connoisseurship, and Humanity.” Invited talk presented alongside Christopher J. Nygren for the Safra Colloquy at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2023.
“Studying Images through and with Technologies.” Invited talk for the Technological Revolutions and Art History Symposium, co-hosted by The Frick Art Reference Library and the Museum of Modern Art, online, October, 15, 2020. https://youtu.be/Ky6zal0xbCU
“Programming Mentorship.” Keynote for Code4Lib 2020, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 2020. https://youtu.be/avfjLyHszps?t=124
“Can Computers Do Research?” Presentation for an invitation-only workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science entitled, “What Is Research?” Berlin, Germany, June 12-13, 2019.
Academic Presentations
“Revitalizing, Maintaining, & Sunsetting the Digital Humanities: Strategies & Opportunities.” Invited panel participant at the 2025 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, Lisbon, Portugal, July 2025.
“Teaching the Digital Humanities to a Broad Undergraduate Population.” Paper presented at the 2003 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, Graz, Austria, July 2023.
“Digital Sustainability and Digital Art History: Alison Stones’ Impact.” Roundtable presentation at the 2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2023.
“Extracting and Analyzing Deep Learning Features for Discriminating Historical Art.” Paper presented with Paul Rodriguez at Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC ’20), online conference, July 2020.
“Forms of Equivalence: Bertillonnage and the History of Information Management.” Paper presented with Josh Ellenbogen at Digital Frontiers 2018, University of Kansas Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, Lawrence, Kansas, October 2018.
“What Do We Want Digital History to Look Like Now?” Panel presentation at the 132nd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., January 2018.
Curatorial Work
Lead Curator, Data (after)Lives: The Persistence of Encoded Identity, University Art Gallery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 9-October 14, 2016.
