Anne Luther
Dr. Anne Luther is a specialist for digital heritage and a digital humanities scholar. Her work applies technology, design and humanities research for the interaction, exploration and opening of cultural heritage preserved and represented in digital data. She is the founder of The Institute for Digital Heritage and Principal Investigator for Digital Benin, leading the development of a digital platform which brings together rich documentation from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artworks looted in the 19th century from the Kingdom of Benin.
She holds a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, where she developed a pioneering interactive data visualization software for qualitative research. Between 2013 and 2015 she brought a research focus in data driven humanities research to the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping and between 2015 and 2018, she established an emphasis on the analysis of museum data, leading data sprints, workshops, international research collaborations and software development as research coordinator at the Center for Data Arts at Parsons School of Design in New York. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for 2021-22 at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at UPenn and is a Senior External Advisor at Lenfest Center for Cultural PartnershipsSenior External Advisor at Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In 2023 she and her Digital Benin team received the Apollo Magazine award for Digital Innovation.
She secured grants for the Museum am Rothenbaum, MARKK (2.6mio Euro by the Mellon Foundation and 1.5mio Euro by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung), Chair of Modern Art History at TU Berlin (30k Euro by the VW Foundation) and Fordham University ($30k by the NEH) amongst others. She taught Art Theory as a TA for Professor Boris Groys at NYU between 2014 and 2017 and translated his book Logic of the Collection published with MIT Press/Sternberg Press (2021). She worked in several arts institutions internationally including MoMA PS1, the House of World Cultures, Front Desk Apparatus and for Antonia Josten Art World Recruitment.
As a project director for Digital Benin, her work has been featured in The Financial Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Art News, The Art Newspaper amongst other local and international news outlets. She was selected as an expert on Digitization, digitization strategies and digital collection management for the MuseumsLab, a platform for joint learning, exchange and continuing education regarding the future of museums in Africa and Germany, financed by the German Federal Foreign Office in close cooperation with the African consultancy group The Advisors. She is frequently invited to present and consult on digital strategies in museums, team management in digital projects and data-driven research and collaborates with digital research projects world wide.
She holds a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, where she developed a pioneering interactive data visualization software for qualitative research. Between 2013 and 2015 she brought a research focus in data driven humanities research to the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping and between 2015 and 2018, she established an emphasis on the analysis of museum data, leading data sprints, workshops, international research collaborations and software development as research coordinator at the Center for Data Arts at Parsons School of Design in New York. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for 2021-22 at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at UPenn and is a Senior External Advisor at Lenfest Center for Cultural PartnershipsSenior External Advisor at Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In 2023 she and her Digital Benin team received the Apollo Magazine award for Digital Innovation.
She secured grants for the Museum am Rothenbaum, MARKK (2.6mio Euro by the Mellon Foundation and 1.5mio Euro by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung), Chair of Modern Art History at TU Berlin (30k Euro by the VW Foundation) and Fordham University ($30k by the NEH) amongst others. She taught Art Theory as a TA for Professor Boris Groys at NYU between 2014 and 2017 and translated his book Logic of the Collection published with MIT Press/Sternberg Press (2021). She worked in several arts institutions internationally including MoMA PS1, the House of World Cultures, Front Desk Apparatus and for Antonia Josten Art World Recruitment.
As a project director for Digital Benin, her work has been featured in The Financial Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Art News, The Art Newspaper amongst other local and international news outlets. She was selected as an expert on Digitization, digitization strategies and digital collection management for the MuseumsLab, a platform for joint learning, exchange and continuing education regarding the future of museums in Africa and Germany, financed by the German Federal Foreign Office in close cooperation with the African consultancy group The Advisors. She is frequently invited to present and consult on digital strategies in museums, team management in digital projects and data-driven research and collaborates with digital research projects world wide.
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Thesis Chapters
This analysis is based on a visualisation of the structured field data that was generated in a participatory field study in the New York art world, consisting of semi-structured interviews between 2013 – 2015. Limitations in usability and interface design, and the need for a sufficient visualisation tool for qualitative data analysis, drew the focus of this study to the development of a new data visualisation software. After a peer-reviewed process, the software Entity Mapper was selected for use in this thesis to visually analyse the collected and structured data. The analysis takes location, size, hierarchy and movement of the structured data in the visual map into consideration for concluding theoretical statements.
Papers
scholarship encompassing all humanities disciplines
collections research and access as museums and other cultural institutions began publishing their collections
information on the web. But several problems have continued to thwart the next revolution in re-thinking the broad ways
in which museum collections research can encourage use of digital collections. Data ownership, authority in data
validation and terminology, technological progress, a digital divide, data ethics and algorithmic bias are a selection of
discourses that need to be considered in a long standing history of digitizing cultural collections to create a criticality
towards a digital literacy of museum data. Considerate decisions about the development of new tools that allow to
museums to more easily share, visualize, comprehend and analyze cultural data need to reference these discourses in
their extensive design. What are the possibilities for learning from digital humanities and promoting use of museum
digital collections as data? How do we go beyond providing APIs and other open data sets to promote a transformation
for how these data are used for exploration, computational research and creative re-generation? In this forum, panelists
will survey current practice and learn from the aligned discipline of digital humanities for a closer look at using
collections as data. How can museums act to fundamentally change the way we think about publishing and producing
tools for generating new knowledge? What are the ways in which museums can acknowledge, examine, and provide
access to interrogate ethical uses of data and cataloging practices as part of the de-colonization of museums? Panelists
will share concepts and work from the digital humanities, the field of interactive data visualization, examples from the
panelists’ own projects with museums and other emerging collections as data usage in the cultural heritage field.
With every Biennale a specific network of actors takes shape, involving curatorial and research teams, artists and their galleries, funding bodies, artistic collaborators and other public and private support bodies, institutions and their curators that are invited for a one time facilitation of the exhibition, graphic designers and media experts, technicians, transporters and installation teams, art writers and art historians, mediators and art educators, invigilators, etc. An inquiry into the network of actors that biennales bring together is the foundation to understanding how these exhibitions are made. The information that is released about the number and kind of actors involved in the production of each show is a conscious decision communicated in press material, their website and publications. This decision is related to the labor politics and work ethos to which each biennial subscribes as well as to the self-image it seeks to broadcast.
This interactive network graph resulted from an investigation into the specific information made visible about the makers of the 10th Berlin Biennale, as an example of communication of a specific biennale network. The graph visualizes information on the actors mentioned on the website of the Berlin Biennale 10 on the introduction pages of every participating artist. We collected and structured data from the website in a format that allows to develop a node-link network of the various actors and their relationships.
See also: https://data-matters.nyc/?p=18907
Talks
Seth Price is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in a wide range of media. His work has been exhibited internationally and was included in the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the Venice Biennale in 2011 and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. His video works have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival; Tate Britain, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Eyebeam, New York; and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Saint-Gervais, Geneva and in his latest exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (Seth Price biography, studio website).
Drafts
This analysis is based on a visualisation of the structured field data that was generated in a participatory field study in the New York art world, consisting of semi-structured interviews between 2013 – 2015. Limitations in usability and interface design, and the need for a sufficient visualisation tool for qualitative data analysis, drew the focus of this study to the development of a new data visualisation software. After a peer-reviewed process, the software Entity Mapper was selected for use in this thesis to visually analyse the collected and structured data. The analysis takes location, size, hierarchy and movement of the structured data in the visual map into consideration for concluding theoretical statements.
scholarship encompassing all humanities disciplines
collections research and access as museums and other cultural institutions began publishing their collections
information on the web. But several problems have continued to thwart the next revolution in re-thinking the broad ways
in which museum collections research can encourage use of digital collections. Data ownership, authority in data
validation and terminology, technological progress, a digital divide, data ethics and algorithmic bias are a selection of
discourses that need to be considered in a long standing history of digitizing cultural collections to create a criticality
towards a digital literacy of museum data. Considerate decisions about the development of new tools that allow to
museums to more easily share, visualize, comprehend and analyze cultural data need to reference these discourses in
their extensive design. What are the possibilities for learning from digital humanities and promoting use of museum
digital collections as data? How do we go beyond providing APIs and other open data sets to promote a transformation
for how these data are used for exploration, computational research and creative re-generation? In this forum, panelists
will survey current practice and learn from the aligned discipline of digital humanities for a closer look at using
collections as data. How can museums act to fundamentally change the way we think about publishing and producing
tools for generating new knowledge? What are the ways in which museums can acknowledge, examine, and provide
access to interrogate ethical uses of data and cataloging practices as part of the de-colonization of museums? Panelists
will share concepts and work from the digital humanities, the field of interactive data visualization, examples from the
panelists’ own projects with museums and other emerging collections as data usage in the cultural heritage field.
With every Biennale a specific network of actors takes shape, involving curatorial and research teams, artists and their galleries, funding bodies, artistic collaborators and other public and private support bodies, institutions and their curators that are invited for a one time facilitation of the exhibition, graphic designers and media experts, technicians, transporters and installation teams, art writers and art historians, mediators and art educators, invigilators, etc. An inquiry into the network of actors that biennales bring together is the foundation to understanding how these exhibitions are made. The information that is released about the number and kind of actors involved in the production of each show is a conscious decision communicated in press material, their website and publications. This decision is related to the labor politics and work ethos to which each biennial subscribes as well as to the self-image it seeks to broadcast.
This interactive network graph resulted from an investigation into the specific information made visible about the makers of the 10th Berlin Biennale, as an example of communication of a specific biennale network. The graph visualizes information on the actors mentioned on the website of the Berlin Biennale 10 on the introduction pages of every participating artist. We collected and structured data from the website in a format that allows to develop a node-link network of the various actors and their relationships.
See also: https://data-matters.nyc/?p=18907
Seth Price is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in a wide range of media. His work has been exhibited internationally and was included in the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the Venice Biennale in 2011 and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. His video works have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival; Tate Britain, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Eyebeam, New York; and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Saint-Gervais, Geneva and in his latest exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (Seth Price biography, studio website).