I guess you’re right Signore Moretti
Well, I read Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees. After my head stopped spinning I decided that he’s probably right, but not ALL the way right. He got me thinking about how I can use things like graphs and data-mining in art history. He also got me thinking about how our old methods of creating scholarly arguments could potentially be destroyed by conducting quantitative research.
First, I’m going to jump the gun and predict what our second project is going to be. Reading this week’s material leads me to assume that we are going to have to do a piece of quantitative research. This type of research could make things like historiography much easier. Last fall, I did a lengthy literature review on Caravaggio’s secular paintings; an example of which I’ve included.
I got to review the entire spectrum of art historical methods. I came to the conclusion that Caravaggio’s secular paintings became much more interesting to scholars after lesbian/gay issues emerged as popular topic for discussion in art history.
Rather than reading book after book after book….after book, I could have searched for recurring words in all of these books (assuming that they are all digitized), and likely found the same pattern I found after reading them all. The search would have involved coming up with key words associated with each historical method and then graphing the number of occurrences of those words over time. If out second project is to do some quantitative history I think this will be my project.
The problem with being able to mine the entire body of work on a topic is that it could potentially make any argument at all impossible. One of the great things about old-fashioned historical research is that you can just simply use the sources that fit in nicely with your argument and push aside the ones that don’t. Soon, we’ll have no excuse for structuring arguments this way! Gasp! Hopefully, using Moretti’s quantitative methods will push us to come up with more nuanced, and perhaps more radical arguments than would have been possible a few years ago.
I came to a similar conclusion in my blog, that is that the exceptions that are inevitable in the study of (art) history to the quantitative data are its greatest challenges. That’s why I think there’s room for both “old-fashioned historical research” and the new methods put forth by Moretti. In some ways they both compliment each other: quantitative research gives us new data, but we (art) historians have to interpret that data…and its exceptions. Like you, I fear one without the other!
I agree that this way of working just makes research seem daunting. Even though these new quantitative methods offer new possibilities, it seems that abundance still poses problems. It is now up to the historian to think of innovative research questions, but also to interpret more data.
I guess my question would be where does it end/how should our standards of what is acceptable or enough research evolve given these new methods?
Interesting project idea. I kept thinking about ways to use this kind of method in art history and, me being me, I focused on what is not there, i.e, data (as in primary sources), instead of on the making of the history of art. I like that angle.
Regarding the potential loss of a learned way of doing research and writing art history, I have to admit that I get more excited than scared thinking about the idea of more art historical quantitative data. Why would we want to keep building arguments that have no foundation on “reality,” but that are only self-fulfilling constructs? Which is not to say that those arguments or ways of constructing arguments will no longer be valid, but that we will need additional disclaimers and to finally abandon the idea of universality. I think the discipline could use some tempering at this point.
A thoughtful post. Put simply, is it your conclusion, then, that all generalizations are dead? Wouldn’t that pose a problem beyond scholarship–i.e., how would we teach anything about the past?
When I read your post, I realized how narrowly I had been looking at Moretti’s book and Cohen’s article. I read the book first, and, apparently since I am GIS-inclined, I did not even realize that I needed to reign my mind in and not follow the immediatly apparent path that it becomes aware of. I was thiking geospatially as soon as I began the book (I at least waited until I started reading to take that route) and I was seeing how the topices all could have been very effectively charted with geospatial technology, rather than seeing the bigger picture. That picture was, as you stated, quantitative research. Thanks to you, I am now thinking of the frightening ideas of quntitative research when paired with the always-becoming-more-limitless amount of data available in our new, digital world. My head is spinning, thinking of this now. I wonder how this will shape the way that historical research is done and what standards might be put in place. The question does remain; will this make our work harder or make us lazy, or inclined to use less data than is appropriate? If a historian were to ignore contradictory data in her argument, could she do so by rationalizing to herself that, since there is so much data available, she cannot be held responsible for what she missed? I think that this will have to lead to new standards for historical research and writing.