"Digital Navigations, Storytelling and Accessible Art History" was the titel of the paper I presented at Nordik 2015 in Reykjavik two weeks ago. To cut it short I talked on "Why do my students not Google enough?". Generally students seems to have low digital literacy. They do look for texts (Wikipedia, exhibition presentations etc.) as a way to find "real" answers to my questions (and perhaps in hope of not having to read textbooks), but they don't seem to search for reproductions of art works or interact with digitised art collections. I foolishly thought they were more skilled than me, but it can be quite challenging to find things if you don't know how to navigate in different digitised environments. One problem is that museums tend to have their own logic archiving collections and this often organises how the collections gets digitised. So now I am planning new assignments that will help future students explore the Internet for art treasures.

This is the abstract:

Digital navigations, storytelling and accessible art history

Digital art collections have improved dramatically in the past decades. Attempts are made to extend existing collections and interaction with on-line visitors is encouraged by making galleries, tagging images with information outside established art terminology that enables new ways of searching etc. There are also other forums for discussing and exposing art: digital archives like Google Art Project, and archives for digitally born artworks like deviantArt. These digital places attract “nerds”, who both interact and engage themselves in the communities. Unfortunately students often are not part of these interactions. In order to make art students use digital art archives better, more research is to be done on the various tools of interaction and the meaning-makings of art blogs, twitter accounts and Facebook-groups etc. This could make the discipline of art history more relevant to social developments by developing new critical methods and educate new kinds of curators and art critics.