The Visual Media Workshop is a collaborative work space where we research historical and contemporary visual culture in an environment that encourages technological experimentation. Its vibrant community includes undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers, and it is home to a forum for exploring interpretive, humanities-centered challenges in a digital milieu.
The work we do in the VMW is designed to be as self-reflexive as possible, emphasizing iterative approaches to our research—always taking the time it needs to refine questions and respond productively to new findings and realizations. We also spend significant energy thinking about how our tools work both for and against us, and about the cultural and historical dimensions of the digital information practices we use on a daily basis. As a constantly-evolving laboratory, the VMW continues to challenge notions of isolated scholarship, and strives to mobilize a community of researchers committed to addressing pervasive conceptual concerns in the humanities.
The VMW maintains multiple lab-based research projects that change over the years as older ideas find conclusions and new ideas arise. They are each managed collaboratively, with graduate students from both the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Computing and Information often taking the lead.
If you would like to learn more about the work of the VMW, or if you would like to see how you might become involved, please feel free to contact the Director, Alison Langmead, at adlangmead@pitt.edu.
Projects:
- Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap
- The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (http://sustainingdh.net) was one of the most significant deliverables from the NEH-funded project, “Sustaining MedArt,” housed between 2016-2018 in the VMW. The purpose of Sustaining MedArt was to evaluate the current condition of the website “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture,” also known as MedArt, and to create a sustainability plan for the website’s future.MedArt is a digital collection of images of medieval art and architecture photographed primarily by Dr. M. Alison Stones, now professor emerita at University of Pittsburgh, and her students. A project team comprised of Dr. Stones and her then-student Jane Vadnal began work on the website in 1995, the pioneering age of the internet, and intended to use it as a classroom tool. Soon, MedArt developed into a well-known and reputable site for images of medieval art and architecture that was utilized by academics all over the world.Over time, MedArt was updated less and less frequently. When Dr. Stones retired in 2010, the Visual Media Workshop became the steward of the project, although Dr. Stones remains actively interested in its ongoing persistence. The purpose of the Sustaining MedArt grant was to determine the best way to sustain MedArt for the ongoing future. The final goal of the project was to create a digital sustainability roadmap for other developers and curators of digital projects to follow based on what we had discovered.The sustainability findings from the Sustaining MedArt project became the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, which has been presented in dozens of locations across the United States over the past decade, are what you see on this site now. The final 2018 white paper for the original “Sustaining MedArt Project” can be found here. The final 2019 white paper that focuses on a nationwide presentation of the Socio-Technical Sustainability roadmap can be found here.
- Teaching Art History with AI
- Funded in 2023-2024 by the NEH-ODH grant opportunity, “Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities,” this project comprised a series of face-to-face and online convenings intended to create a peer-supported learning community of college/university-level educators who wish to integrate a better understanding of computational image generation technologies (such DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion into their teaching practices. The final white paper for this project can be found at the NEH website here: https://awardsearch.neh.gov/AwardDetail.aspx?gn=DOI-293720-23.
Image by Hossein Nakhaei. Date: 2024. Source: Chat GPT Plus.
Prompt: "Artist’s Self Portrait" - Itinera
- Itinera is a web-based, interactive resource that allows scholars to visualize and investigate the interconnected phenomena of travel, object collection, and site documentation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once only focused on Western travelers, Itinera now hosts a number of documented travel itineraries from West and South Asia. It has been a part of the VMW since 2012 and will be decommissioned in the next few years, becoming a site of additional digital sustainability research.
