Rethinking the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art in the Internet Age

Abstract

The formation and perpetuation of intellectual canons – as consensually agreed upon corpora considered most significant and representative of a time, place or person – rely heavily on closed systems of knowledge. The bound-paper book exemplifies such a closed system and has been a primary form of constructing and disseminating canons of ancient works. The Internet, however, challenges the very structuring principles of knowledge production inherent in books, offering potentially boundless networks of unorchestrated knowledge bits. As scholars, teachers, and students turn more to the Internet for publication, research, and learning, sharply defined canons face disruption. This article analyzes some of the structuring principles of knowledge production and dissemination in the specific case of ancient Near Eastern art, first considering traditional book-based textbooks. These textbooks follow a model of linear temporal development that unfolds from the first to the last page. It then explores the academic trend toward edited, multi-authored compendia as a concurrent development with the open-ended, networked structure of the Internet. Both vehicles of knowledge production offer more diverse sets of works and multivocality; the Internet in particular permits a radical break from authored and edited narratives. Last, the article considers some of the possibilities, as well as limitations, inherent in the Internet, presenting several existing Internet-based platforms with a specific focus on pedogogy, in order to consider the implications and consequences for knowledge production and dissemination in the Digital Age.

Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture

“…Although these abundant quantities of images are available through a variety of channels, including digital libraries and aggregators of cultural heritage data (Sood, 2016;, we do not know if and how images in the aggregators represent various cultures, genres and geographic regions (Thylstrup, 2019). This means that if larger quantities of objects, images and stories related to a particular idea or representation of selected knowledge are present in large aggregators of cultural content, these ideas and concepts will be better accessed, disseminated and studied and they will become the foundation of the new digital canon (Earheart, 2012;Feldman, 2017;Thylstrup, 2019;Zaagsma, 2019).…”

“…Building a corpus of artworks that include a proportion of objects from a variety of cultures, offering non-colonial social constructs and perspectives, can enlarge the art history canon, and enable further analysis via Digital Humanities techniques (Earhart, 2012;Feldman, 2017, Kizhner et al, 2019. Since the initial museological literature of the 1990s 1 on the reduction of the colonized world presented in museums, an approach that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Boast, 2011, p. 64), numerous studies have emphasized the difficulties of having a multicultural or non-unitary experience in a museum (Ashley, 2005;Knell et al, 2010;Boast, 2011;Polm, 2016).…”

“Opening” Art History: Exploring the Motivations and Practices of Faculty using Open Educational Resources in Lower-Level and General Education Art History Courses

“…Moreover, survey classes often exclusively rely on textbooks, which are filled with high-quality art images, but written in a dry, matter-of-fact style that is unappealing to a general education population. Textbook-based knowledge, as well, encourages and actively contributes to the formation of canons (Feldman 2017;Grever 2007). Textbooks, like all books, have beginnings, middles, and ends; they are "bounded containers" of authoritative knowledge composed by singular experts; and they're embedded with deep yet invisible epistemological assumptions about the grounds of art, of history, and of teaching (Friesen 2017).…”