Revisualizing Visual Culture

The rise of digital technologies over the last twenty years has created fundamental challenges for the ways libraries, archives, and museums deal with visual records: how they are described, searched for, and accessed. The eleven chapters of Revisualizing Visual Culture discuss, in theoretical and practical terms, the opportunities and challenges of this changed environment, and, in doing so, give a sense of how these issues could develop in the coming years.

In spite of the title's emphasis on revisualizing, many of the contributions to the book focus on the importance of applying meaningful verbal metadata to pieces of visual culture, whether they be images or complex architectural representations or works of digital media. The possibilities offered by the semantic web and by approaches inspired by Web 2.0 offer new ways to extend traditional descriptive approaches and enable new opportunities for involving and engaging users. The chapters in the collection assess these possible innovations from both theoretical and practical perspectives, considering both benefits and risks.

The individual contributors to the volume bring a range of interests and specializations to the issues of visual culture. Many of the perspectives are practical and focused, reflecting on hands-on experience with new practices and new technologies. Other chapters are speculative and wide ranging, such as James MacDevitt's theoretical and philosophical analysis of the user-archivist of the Networked Digital Archive, and Charlie Gere's reflections on the effect of the World Wide Web on the way we see. Charlotte Frost discusses net art in "Internet Art History 2.0," and Daniela Sirbu, of the University of Lethbridge, writes on "Digital Explorations of Past Design Concepts in Architecture"; both of these chapters map out a range of new visual artefacts that museums, libraries, and archives must find ways of describing, storing, and making accessible.

The collection has a distinctively British emphasis. Many of the contributions to the volume grew out of the Computers and History of Art (CHArt) group, which has been an active force in research on the application of digital technology to visual culture since 1985. While there are references to British projects and cultural institutions, readers will find the problems and ideas articulated relevant and accessible.