CAA News Today
CAA and SAH Release Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 23, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA), working jointly with the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), has released its Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History for Promotion and Tenure. The guidelines are the result of a Task Force convened by the two associations of ten members from the academic community with experience in digital research, publication, and/or scholarly communications and administration. Established by the Board of Directors in October 2014 and supported by funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this joint task force of CAA and SAH was co-chaired by DeWitt Godfrey, president, CAA and professor of art and art history, Colgate University; and Kenneth Breisch, SAH president and assistant professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California.
See the SAH announcement.
The project methodology was developed through a collaborative process involving the Task Force, consultant, researcher, and representatives from CAA and SAH. Research components included results from surveys of CAA and SAH members and department chairs, a similar questionnaire for graduate students, interviews with scholars and administrators, research on existing disciplinary and institutional evaluation guidelines, and a review of relevant literature. Alice Lynn McMichael, PhD candidate in Byzantine art history and digital fellow at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, and Raym Crow, principal at Chain Bridge Group served as researcher and consultant.
In addition to a review of current guidelines and current literature on the topic, the researcher was charged with balancing broad survey data with more in-depth discussions of topics that resonate with evaluators of digital work. To this end, interviews were conducted with constituents from sixteen institutions across the United States that produce digital work regularly in art and/or architectural history. Institutions were either public and private and research-intensive or teaching-focused. Interviewees at those institutions had varying academic ranks and included department members, librarians, provosts, deans, chairs, and directors of humanities centers or similar.
Highlights from surveys from CAA and SAH members and interviews include the following:
- Most CAA respondents, across all professional ranks, have never used data gathering and imaging tools (83%), data analysis and visualization tools (80%), three-dimensional modeling (75%), digital storage and preservation tools (73%), and geospatial analysis tools (65%).
- Many characteristics of digital resources were generally valued as important, with the highest importance placed on permanent archiving, documentation of the resource, and ease of use; and relatively less importance on the availability of underlying data, financial sustainability, and permanent citation.
- Graduate students report the highest confidence in evaluating digital scholarship.
- Less than 4 percent of total respondents knew of existing evaluative criteria for digital scholarship in their departments.
- The largest barrier to digital scholarship is lack of access to training.
Read the full Guidelines here. An essay, “Case Studies and Examples for Evaluating Digital Scholarship” by Michelle Millar Fisher, a task force member, provides background information on evaluating digital resources and can be found on the College Art Association website.
Members of the Task Force included:
- Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehall Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
- Kenneth Breisch, SAH President, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California, and Cochair of Task Force
- Linda Downs (ex officio), Executive Director, College Art Association
- Gabrielle Esperdy, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Editor of SAH Archipedia
- Michelle Miller Fisher, PhD Candidate, Art History, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, and Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art
- Pamela M. Fletcher, Professor of Art History, Chair of Art Department, and Codirector of Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, Bowdoin College
- DeWitt Godfrey, CAA President, Professor of Art and Art History, Colgate University, and Cochair of Task Force
- Anne Collins Goodyear, Codirector, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
- Paul Jaskot, Professor, History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor, CASVA
- Bruce M. Mackh, Director, Arts and Cultural Management Program, Michigan State University
- Tara McPherson, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
- Abby Smith Rumsey, Former Director, Scholarly Communication Institute, University of Virginia
- Pauline Saliga (ex officio), Executive Director, Society of Architectural Historians
- Ann Whiteside, Librarian and Assistant Dean of Information Services, Harvard University
About CAA
The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage, preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching. Learn more at collegeart.org.
About SAH
Founded in 1940, the Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by vocation or avocation, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs. Learn more at sah.org.
Survey about an Online Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Art History
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 02, 2015
ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org recently received a grant from The Kress Foundation to conduct preliminary research for an e-journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Art History that will launch in 2016.
We are writing to ask for your help with this initiative by completing a ten-minute survey before July 17.
AHTR is a peer-populated website, committed to experimentation, participation, and fostering community around teaching and learning in art history. The new e-journal Art History Pedagogy and Practice will build on this foundation to engage anyone interested in rigorous scholarship and quality content around pedagogical issues in art history.
This survey aims to identify stakeholders in this project and to make sure the e-journal responds to their needs. The survey will also help clarify the e-journal’s place within the existing landscape of SoTL, art history, and pedagogical research/practice, and help us better understand how a discipline-specific SoTL in art history might provide greater support for research around teaching and learning in the field.
We are distributing the survey to members of the art history and museum communities, but also seek input from university administrators, libraries, teaching/learning centers, academic technologists, and others involved in art history education. Please forward the survey to anyone you think would be willing to offer their feedback. We’re grateful for your time and theirs in helping shape what we hope will be a resource for many. We apologize for any cross-postings you may receive, but know the project will be strengthened by the broadest participation.
Click here to access the on-line survey.
(Survey participants will be eligible to win one of four $50 Amazon gift cards)
If you have questions or want more information about the e-journal initiative, we are in the process of creating an Art History Pedagogy and Practice page on the AHTR website. Immediate inquiries should be sent to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Virginia B. Spivey, Parme Giuntini, Renee McGarry
Project Leaders, Art History Pedagogy and Practice Initiative
Michelle Millar Fisher, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Karen Shelby, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Kathleen Wentrack, Contributing Editor, AHTR
Mellon Foundation Helps CAA Continue Publishing Award for Emerging Scholars
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 21, 2015
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a second grant of $60,000 to the College Art Association (CAA) to administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for one year. The award was first given to CAA in 2013 as a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award will provide grants directly to emerging scholars to offset the costs of securing images for their first books. Recipients will be selected on the basis of the quality and financial need of their project, and awards will be made twice during the year (in the summer and fall). CAA anticipates awarding between ten and twelve Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Awards in 2015.
Scholars may submit applications for the summer round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award before the June 12, 2015 deadline. The fall deadline is September 15, 2015. CAA will administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award according to guidelines developed for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant, an award established in 1975 by a generous bequest from the late Professor Millard Meiss. The jury for the award, comprising distinguished, mid-career or senior scholars whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship, has discretion over the number of and size of the awards. For further information about the award and to apply, please visit www.collegeart.org/meissmellon.
CAA seeks to alleviate high reproductions rights costs related to publishing in the arts. With funding from a separate, generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a start-up grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, CAA recently published its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. Part of a multi-year effort led by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, the Code presents a set of principles addressing best practices in the fair use of copyrighted materials based on a consensus of opinion developed through discussions with visual-arts professionals.
For specific questions about applying to the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, please contact Sarah Zabrodski, CAA editorial manager, at szabrodski@collegeart.org or 212-392-4424.
CAA’s Webinar on Fair Use in Scholarship Is This Friday, April 10!
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Apr 09, 2015
Register now for the next webinar in CAA’s series on fair use in the visual arts meeting this Friday, April 10 at 1 PM EDT. Join the lead principal investigators of CAA’s new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication at American University and Peter Jaszi, professor of law in the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University’s Washington College of Law, for an in-depth look at the Code’s section on fair use in analytic writing. Registration for the live event is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
A video recording of the first webinar held on March 27th, “An Introduction to CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts,” is now available for CAA members. To access, log into your CAA account and click on the “Webinars” link in the left-hand navigation. Recordings of each webinar in the series will be made available to members the week following the event.
CAA will issue Certificates of Participation to those who attend all five webinars in the series. Registration secures you a spot in all four remaining webinars, however you may attend any number of the remaining webinars through this registration. The webinars will cover the following topics:
April 10, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Scholarship
May 15, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Teaching and Art Practice
May 29, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Museums and Archives
June 5, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in the Visual Arts: A Review
Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to CAA to Partner with SAH on Digital Scholarship Guidelines
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 29, 2014
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a $90,000 grant to partner with the Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) in the development of guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in art and architectural history for promotion and tenure. CAA and SAH will convene a task force, hire a researcher to examine evaluative practices in departments of art and architectural history, develop a survey to seek current practices from CAA and SAH members, and provide evaluative guidelines. CAA President DeWitt Godfrey said, “Since its founding in 1911, CAA has regularly issued Standards and Guidelines for the fields of art and art history. These guidelines will encompass projects in art and architectural history that use digital technologies in research, production, publication, and/or exhibition. These growing forms of scholarship are in critical need of support and recognition, and this grant will allow CAA and SAH to provide standardized guidelines for those evaluating digital art and architectural history.”
This project will mark the first time that CAA and SAH will collaborate on professional practice guidelines, although the two associations have worked closely in other areas in the past. Pauline Saliga, SAH executive director announced, “The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to collaborate with our sister organization, the College Art Association, on this important endeavor. Because art and architectural historians are increasingly working collaboratively and using digital tools and data to construct their arguments, it is very important that we develop a set of guidelines for universities to recognize this innovative work.”
The ten-person task force will be chaired by CAA President DeWitt Godfrey and SAH President Ken Breisch. In addition to the chairs, the task force will comprise eight members with substantial experience in traditional and digital scholarship: two art historians, two architectural historians, a librarian, a museum curator, a scholar from another humanities or social-science field with expertise in digital scholarship, and a graduate student or emerging professional in art or architectural history.
The need for evaluative guidelines has been expressed by professors of art and architectural history who have developed research and/or publications using digital technologies, have created new digital tools for interpretation and understanding of art-historical and place-based subjects, or have collaborated with other scholars to develop digital archives and resources; by professors and administrators who have responsibility for dissertations and promotion and tenure committees but lack the necessary tools to assess digital scholarship; by CAA’s and SAH’s editorial boards and advisory committees, whose journals and online academic resources now require guidelines to facilitate critical reviews of digital scholarship; by CAA and SAH publication and award juries who need protocols for judging the quality of digital scholarship to determine awards; by academic publishers; and by other disciplines and their learned societies.
CAA and SAH anticipate that the guidelines will address different types of scholarly digital contributions: those that provide new resources, such as archives and new research tools (examples include SAH Archipedia and SAHARA); those that create scholarship in art and architectural history using publishing platforms such as Scalar and the JSTOR Current Scholarship program; those that create scholarship based on spatial and visualization technologies; and those that engage in new computational technologies.
CAA and SAH anticipate that shared guidelines will reassure art and architectural historians that new forms of digital research and scholarship will be evaluated and credentialed; provide tenure committees with specific criteria for evaluating digital projects in art and architectural history; and ensure that digital scholarship can be evaluated and supported through juries and grants, thereby increasing awareness and participation of scholars in the digital realm.
About CAA
The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage, preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching. Learn more at collegeart.org.
About SAH
Founded in 1940, the Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by vocation or avocation, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs. Learn more at sah.org.
For more information, please contact Hillary Bliss, CAA development and marketing manager, at hbliss@collegeart.org or 212-392-4436.
Mellon Foundation Helps CAA Initiate a Publishing Award for Emerging Scholars
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 23, 2013
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a one-year grant of $60,000 to administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. The award is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award will provide grants directly to emerging scholars to offset the high costs of image acquisition. Recipients will be selected on the basis of the quality and financial need of their project, and awards will be made twice during the year (in the spring and fall) in conjunction with CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund awards to publishers. CAA anticipates awarding between eight and ten Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Awards in 2013.
The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award supports image rights and reproduction costs for books on topics in art history and visual studies. The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) also received one year of funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and will award grants to emerging scholars who are publishing monographs on the built environment. Both the CAA and SAH awards will provide leading authors in the early stages of their careers with the financial resources to acquire images for scholarly publications. For information about the SAH award, visit www.sah.org or contact Beth Eifrig at info@sah.org.
Applications for the first round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award are now being accepted. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2013, with a second round of applications due on September 15, 2013. CAA will administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award according to guidelines developed for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant, an award established in 1975 by a generous bequest from the late Professor Millard Meiss. The jury for the award, comprising distinguished, mid-career or senior scholars whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship, has discretion over the number of and size of the awards. For further information about the award and to apply, please visit www.collegeart.org/meissmellon.
CAA seeks to alleviate high reproductions rights costs related to publishing in the arts. With funding from a separate grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA recently initiated a project to explore the overall impact of copyright on the arts and how different understandings of copyright affect creative and scholarly choices in the visual arts. Over a four-year period, from 2013–2016, CAA will produce an issues report and a code of best practices for fair use in the creation and curation of artworks and scholarly publishing in the visual arts.
For further information please contact Virginia Reinhart, CAA marketing and communications associate, at vreinhart@collegeart.org or 212-392-4426. For information on applying to the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, please contact Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate, at agershuny@collegeart.org or 212-392-4424.
Distinguished Scholars, Conference History, and List of Presidents on the CAA Website
posted by Christopher Howard — May 04, 2011
This month CAA debuts several new sections of its website, gathering previously published material and adding new historical content. Read about the Distinguished Scholars, review a full list of Annual Conference dates and locations, see who served as a CAA president, and browse obituaries written especially for the website since mid-2008.
Established in 2001, the Distinguished Scholar Session illuminates and celebrates the contributions of senior art historians who emerged in the wake of World War II. Not intended as a static honor, the event can be viewed as the equivalent of a living Festschrift: an occasion for applauding, examining, and extending a distinguished career in art history and an opportunity for encouraging dialogue between and among several generations of scholars.
The first three Distinguished Scholars are James S. Ackerman, Leo Steinberg, and Phyllis Pray Bober. CAA honored the current recipient, Jonathan Brown of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York.
CAA held its first gathering in 1911 in Urbana, Illinois, as the College Art Section of the Western Drawing and Manual Training Association. After adopting a constitution in May 1912, the newly formed organization held its second meeting seven months later in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Subsequent Annual Conferences have been held across North America, from Boston to San Francisco, Toronto to San Antonio, and Atlanta to Seattle.
The CAA president leads the Board of Directors and represents the organization as a whole for a single two-year term. CAA’s first president, Holmes Smith, was a professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught drawing and designed his school’s official sea in 1896. For many decades, though, an art historian led the organization—Henry Radford Hope and Lamar Dodd were notable exceptions. In 1990, visual artists began filling the role more often, with five of the last eleven presidents—including the current one, Barbara Nesin—being practitioners instead of scholars.
In the Obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. In addition to publishing a semimonthly roundup of recent deaths in the arts, CAA accepts texts written especially for the newsletter and website. Authored obituaries from mid-2008 are collected online, with earlier texts to be published over the coming months.
What is CAA doing today? Read more about important dates and deadlines for the organization’s programs, events, and services in Deadlines. Find out how you can get involved!
Image: Leo Steinberg was the 2002 Distinguished Scholar (photograph by Pamela Blackwell)
Center for Social Media Publishes Fair-Use Guidelines for Communications Scholars
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 28, 2010
The Center for Social Media, part of the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC, has published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication. Patricia Aufderheide, the center’s director, and Peter Jaszi, a professor of law at the university’s Washington College of Law and head of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, worked with an ad hoc committee on fair use and academic freedom assembled by the International Communication Association to write the text.
The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication is targeted to the work of communications scholars, which draws on the empirical research methods of the social sciences and the qualitative studies of the humanities.
Like their counterparts in other academic areas, including art and art history, communications scholars are often unsure of their rights under United States copyright law. The new best practices give them general information about fair use and describe four situations in which it usually applies: analysis, criticism, and commentary of copyrighted works; quoting copyrighted material for illustration; using copyrighted work to stimulate response, discussion, and other reactions during research; and storing copyrighted material in personal collections and archives.
For more on how copyright relates to art and art history, please visit CAA’s website section on Intellectual Property and the Arts.
MLA and HASTAC Developing Tenure Guidelines for Digital Scholarship
posted by Christopher Howard — May 27, 2009
“Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching,” reports Scott Jaschik at Insider Higher Ed, “what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees.”
While junior professors lament the exclusion or diminution from tenure reviews of their born-digital work, whether publication or project, the Modern Language Association (MLA) and a group called the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) are tackling the issue head on with new guides that offer tenure committees help in properly evaluating digital scholarship. MLA’s Information Technology Committee is developing these guides through a wiki, which publishes both finished and in-progress work.
In his article, “Tenure in a Digital Era,” Jaschik examines the many perceptions and problems at issue, including peer review; digital and print publications; and work that crosses traditional categories of research, teaching, and service.
Join the CAA Board of Directors
posted by CAA — May 06, 2024
Now accepting Board of Directors nominations for the 2025–29 term! CAA seeks individuals passionate about shaping the future of the organization and the field. The Board is responsible for all financial and policy matters related to CAA, as well as promoting excellence in scholarship, curation, design, and art practice. CAA’s Board is also charged with representing and advocating for the membership regarding current issues affecting the visual arts and humanities.
Nominations and/or self-nominations must include the following:
- Nominee name, affiliation, and e-mail address
- Nominator name, affiliation, and e-mail address (if different from nominee)
- Nominee résumé/CV
- Nominee statement of interest (250 words maximum)
Please send all information and/or any questions via e-mail to Maeghan Donohue, CAA Chief of Staff & Director of Strategic Planning, Diversity, and Governance, with the subject line: Board of Directors Nomination.
Deadline: July 12, 2024