World Reflections on Digital Humanities

Christoph Sander

In investigating media changes that occurred 500 years ago and their specific influence on visual communication, it seems appropriate to draw inspiration from the current media revolution that is reshaping the world in which we live and work. Within the group we therefore reflect on our own practices as (art) historians and how these have changed within the past decades as a result of the impact of digital media. For example, these changes are evident in the way we search for and access books, the way we are able to visualize networks of authors, publishers, or early modern scientists, and the fact that we can compare images and art works in digitized forms from all over the world on our computer screens. Have these developments changed our questions and research approaches? And can this knowledge shed light back in time onto the media revolutions that happened in the early modern period? Not only do such investigations prompt us to question our own work within the humanities but, in uncovering the parallels between early modern scientific practices and contemporary ones, we engage with natural scientists and artists in order to understand how they work within and reflect on new media.