Join Arts Future Projects Founder Dr Charlotte Frost at Courtauld for a keynote lecture on 11 November

Monday, October, 26th, 2015

Join us at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, on 11th November, 2015, at 4 pm for a lecture by Dr Charlotte Frost, the founder and director of Arts Future Projects. The keynote lecture “The Future of the Art History Book” by Dr Charlotte Frost is sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellowship, as part of Academic Book Week. She is travelling to London from Hong Kong to give this keynote, and we would love to see faces from the Arts Future community! Don’t forget to tweet us @ArtsFuture or write on our Facebook wall if you are able to join us, or if you have a question or comment for Dr Frost.

Who: Dr Charlotte Frost, Founder/ Director of Arts Future Projects
What: The Future of the Art History Book
When: Wednesday, 11 November, 2015, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Where: Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, United Kingdom
More info: http://courtauld.ac.uk/event/the-future-of-the-art-history-book
Open to all, free admission with advance booking recommended

Abstract

From Lives of the Artists to The Story of Art, and Differencing the Canon, the discipline of art history has been defined by its books (Hyde Minor 1994; Macartney 2011; Shone and Stonnard, 2013). The art history book remains the standard of professional validation and knowledge transfer within the discipline. Yet, with the arrival of the internet and digital publishing technologies, the limiting nature of traditional academic publishing and the potential for alternative models have been exposed (Hall, 2008; Fitzpatrick, 2011; Frosio, 2014). Academic presses have sought to augment and re-engineer the academic text by exploring new systems for aggregation, annotation, collaborative writing, data visualisation, open access and peer review. But art history is seriously behind in developing robust publishing models for the future (Ballon and Westermann, 2006; Evans, Thomson and Watkins, 2011; Zorich, 2012). In this talk, Charlotte Frost regards the art history book as the site of contention in the quest to historicise emerging and often technologically-rich art forms. She asks what should the art history book of the future look like and what should it do differently for the discipline to evolve?

This event is part of Academic Book Week, taking place 9-16 November http://academicbookfuture.org/acbookweek/

Biography

Dr Charlotte Frost is a contemporary art historian and experimental scholar of the digital humanities. She holds an interdisciplinary position with School of Creative Media and the English Department at the City University of Hong Kong. Her work focuses on the history of internet art, online art critical communities, publishing, literary materiality and emerging digital literacies. She conducts practice-based research into the future of arts and humanities scholarship as a producer of open, hybrid and participatory platforms. She is the founder of Arts Future, a set of projects exploring new approaches to publishing and education in the arts. In 2013 Arts Future Book published its first twice-blind-peer-reviewed, multi-format publication Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body by Nathaniel Stern. This was followed by an experimental journal-style article ‘Is Art History Too Bookish’ and artwork ‘#arthistory’ exploring the materiality of art historical literature by Frost.

Her own forthcoming book Art Criticism Online: A History (Gylphi Limited: 2016) will provide a history of online art critical networks from BSS to YouTube and is accompanied by a web-based archive of collaborative research into online art discussion communities. This research was supported by post-doctoral research fellowships at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2011-12) and HUMlab at Umeå University, Sweden (2010). Frost is also the founder of PhD2Published an online resource and community investigating early career publishing strategies, and the off-shoot project Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo). With a Twitter following of over 13,000 these projects have been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Guardian and Inside Higher Education.

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