Digital Humanities is often assumed to be good at engaging with historical collections and artworks because it can link data, join images together virtually, enable new forms of data analytics. All these strategies of remote engagement can, of course, be good things, and are useful. But they do tend towards abstraction. This talk explores the potential for different modes of engagement. It asks how Digital Humanities methods can be used to respond to the digital conditions of, distraction, speed up, abundance, and virtuality, which temper how we live today, and how we experience and make sense of cultural forms new and old. Distraction and virtuality are issues that exercise heritage institutions and art institutions as they seek to engage 21st century audiences. In this paper I argue that DH methods can be deployed to encourage new forms of sustained, embodied, engagement, including with at works we may not feel an immediate sympathy with. The focus is on a project undertaken between the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and Cambridge Digital Humanities in which we took the works of a landscape artist for an augmented series of walks in the landscapes out of which their works emerged.
Keywords:
Digital Humanities, GLAM, Attention, Distraction, Distant Reading, Slow looking.