The 'Nina,' the 'Pinta,' and the Internet - ships in Christopher Columbus' expedition - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

When I start a new class in art history and multimedia, I warn my students that they are signing on to the crew of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, and we are setting off on a voyage of discovery. We are not quite sure what adventures we will have or what we will find, but there will undoubtedly be times of frustration as well as of great excitement. Or we can join another metaphorical crew as we follow the siren song of the new technologies, for we will undoubtedly run into the cyber equivalent of the creatures that plagued Ulysses and his mariners on their mythic journey.

Working over the years at the intersection of art history, education, and the new technologies, I find that I continually sail up to the brink, with visions of what lies just beyond the horizon, wishing for the skills and technology to take me there. A variety of experiences in this realm have led me to a deepening appreciation of the voyages of both Ulysses and Columbus. Ulysses' mythic journey epitomizes the lure of the unknown as well as the dangers that it poses, while Columbus's epitomizes the discovery of new realms.

There are many similarities between Columbus's journey into the unknown and our own attempts to enter cyberspace. To plot his course, Columbus had very sketchy maps to study (in our case, maps composed in arcane script by UNIX and Java programmers hunched over their workstations); he had to persuade someone to sponsor his journey and put up the funds; he had to assemble crews for his ships, and he had to convince the crew members to sail off into the unknown into that area marked oil medieval maps with the warning, "Here be Dragons," where they might find treasure or fall off the edge of the world.

Just as Columbus's discoveries changed the way inhabitants of both Europe and the Americas viewed the world, so the information superhighway is changing the world of education as we know it. The ships that carried goods and information across the Atlantic and linked the sixteenth-century world in a web of commercial and political ties have been replaced by fiber-optic cables that allow us to send and retrieve information almost instantaneously. Just as the utilization of movable type and the printing press by Columbus's contemporary Johannes Gutenberg opened the possibilities of scholarship to a vast audience, so the utilization of the new technologies has the potential for opening the treasures held in the research libraries and museums of the world to us and to our students. I realized that we had entered a revolutionary age when I found myself at home one night using my modem to access the Internet and searching through the catalogues of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, looking up manuscripts that I had, many years before, been able to locate only by traveling to England. The possibilities became even more exciting when I saw that the Bodleian had digitized some images from the manuscripts and put them on the network so I could view their pages from my home.

Several years ago I walked past the open window of a classroom in an Egyptian village and heard a teacher reciting a text, which his students echoed in unison. As the process was repeated with each new passage, I thought of the way we often teach art history: reading our notes to our students, who write down our words, which they later try to replicate on examinations. The Egyptian teacher was using an age-old technique, one that for very good reason valued the ability to memorize. Some of that ability was lost when human beings learned to write, and scholars undoubtedly were concerned about what would happen to the younger generation when they lost the ability to recite long passages from memory. However, since written documents were expensive, the repeat-after-me mode of instruction did not change drastically until the advent of the printing press. Manuscripts that previously had been chained in the library could now be replicated and made available to scholars for their own libraries. As books have become more available, a whole industry has evolved around organizing and cataloguing them so that we can locate those we need. Pedagogy, however, sometimes lagged behind. I still remember with great angst one of the questions on my doctoral examinations: "List all the bibliographic entries for Michelangelo since World War II with place and date of publication." (And this was not an open-book examination!) Needless to say, I failed that part of the exam, but the academic gods must have wanted me to receive my Ph.D., because the next time around the professor asked for the entire bibliography on Jan van Eyck, which I had memorized. Old habits die hard, and old teaching habits die even harder.

Changes in the use of visual resources available to us have sometimes been met with the same conservatism that is found in the unwillingness to embrace the retrieval capabilities for textual resources. I have always felt that my primary task as a professor of art history was to get the students to the work of art itself so that it could speak directly to them. But in order to bring about that result, I had to give them some idea of the meaning of the work and to set it in an appropriate stylistic and cultural context. And in order to do that, I needed reproductions of the works.