Digital Scholarship Guide: Visual Arts
Art historians are going to use the same approaches and tools as historians working on different time periods and cultural questions. Check out the Digital Scholarship Hub Guide for Historical Disciplines. .
Essential Skills and Tools
Digital Arts Software
- Even if you are a non-digital visual artist, digital arts software can help you plan and design projects, convert your work to a digital format for sharing, and create online platforms for dissemination.
- Experience with Adobe Creative Cloud is imperative for many visual arts careers. This collection of applications and services for image and video creation and editing is among the most popular for professionals and students alike.
- For artists interested in video and film, Adobe Premiere Pro (part of Adobe Creative Cloud) and Final Cut Pro are the leading options for editing and production software.
Image Archiving and Management
- Backing up image files is critical if you are uploading your artwork to a computer. Archiving them digitally is a great option. This will also help you manage your image files.
- Tropy is a free software designed for archivists that lets you ascribe metadata to every image file. Other options include Google Drive, Flickr, and Dropbox.
Creative Coding
Creative coding is the use of computer coding to fulfill aesthetic rather than practical needs. In visual arts, creative coding is used to create and modify images and video. Different programming environments, software packages, and languages are designed for different purposes.
- Processing focuses on the specific needs of visual artists and is a great free option for beginners
- openFrameworks is a C++ creative coding toolkit for interactive projects
- Jitter is another toolkit and is designed especially for combining visuals with audio.
Dissemination
Whether you are an artist or an art historian, modern communities are inevitably connected to your work. The most effective displays consider the audience’s needs and interests, and are often using open source tools.
- Digital dissemination platforms like StoryMaps can help you reframe your research and share it with others.
- Showcase your career and research online with a custom website.
- Visualize how different visual styles changed through time or across space. Useful for your publications, or for your classroom.
3D Objects and Spaces
- Virtual reality simulations and interactive 3D spaces are effective toolkits for designing museum exhibitions.
- 3D object modeling can help you to plan out sculptures and installation art and to generate and print new media. You can attend a Photogrammetry training in the DS Lab to learn more about this process.
Digital Visual Arts Scholars at Brandeis
Are you a Brandeis staff/faculty member and would like to be listed? Contact Dr. Natalie Susmann.
Digital Visual Arts Training Resources
Brandeis Makerlab has a wide array of digital and non-digital tools that are easily integrated into the above skillsets. You can learn how to 3D scan an object in the DS Lab; next, print a physical copy using a 3D printer in the Makerlab. You can learn to sew, use a laser cutter, and more.
Sound and Image Media Studios Located on Farber 3, Sound and Image Media Studios (SIMS) provides members of the Brandeis community with training and support in video production, graphic design, digital photography, and animation.
Linkedin Learning offers tutorials relevant to many areas of digital visual arts including rendering and 3D modeling, graphic and web design, video, photography, animation, and illustration. You can access these for free through Brandeis’ campus-wide subscription.
Processing has free video and text tutorials for both beginners and advanced users of the language.
Digital Visual Arts Publications
This Zotero library is regularly updated with publications discussing digital scholarship’s impact on Visual Arts.
Many thanks to Nathan Bernstein ('24) for contributing to this page. This page was last updated on August 20, 2024. If you would like to contribute, please contact Dr. Natalie Susmann.