ArtServe and the Teaching of Art History

1 Introduction

The public 'face' of my Department is ArtServe; this currently has 5.938 gigabytes of material, over half of which is dedicated to over 2,500 large (1.6 megapixel) images of the stupa of Borobudur (presentation in preparation). The rest of the material is devoted to European art (including prints and sculpture) and architecture, with a classical and renaissance slant.

For copyright reasons, the server on which the student material is located (called ArtSurf - or even ArtSerf when the machine on which it sits has especially abysmal response times) is restricted to accesses from within the University. This server is described in an Appendix to this paper.

This is clearly silly. The whole point of the Web is that it should be a cooperative venture so that we all save money and time by sharing the work - we digitise Italian art, you digitise American art, or whatever. Currently copyright prevents such sensible sharing, unless easy ways can be established of restricting access to such 'student-only' sites to '.edu.au' machines.

If the copyright situation becomes clearer - a very big 'if' indeed - then we look forward to mechanisms for sharing our materials with university and other institutions throughout Australia and further afield, whether over the Web, or via CDROM.

One thing much in the favour of the Web is the ease with which such sharing of materials can now be done. Remember the old days, when institutions such as museums usually didn't want to re-organise their datafiles so that everyone marched to the beat of the same drum? The usually argument was You re-organise to be like me - not vice versa!.

1.1 The Internet and Web In Universities

So I immediately offer some observations about the current state of the art of using computers and networks in teaching, learning and research, all of which should be inseparable one from the others in a University context, and which are particularly acute when the expenses associated with imaging are involved.

• Cost: A hot topic at present is the sheer cost of offering university members free access to all the Internet and Web. A colleague suggests that in North America, campus network speeds are an order of magnitude greater, and costs an order of magnitude less, than here in Australia;

• Telstra: Costs were moderate when the AVCC ran the lines. Currently however, Telstra apparently charges $200 per incoming gigabyte, so that any university in Australia providing access to all the Web (and it's almost pointless restricting the facility just to Australia) faces enormous bills, which get larger the more adventurously its staff and students investigate images, video and sound. I imagined the Web had conquered the Tyranny of Distance, only to find that we now face Telstra with charging which is not even on a sliding scale. Why the AVCC does not again take our networks into their own hands beats me!

• Research: Although the quantity of materials on the Web is getting large, its nature is often very fragmented. Its nature is getting to be sufficient for undergraduates to use its resources for researching papers and seminars; but the amount of original material on the Web - let alone of essential archival resources - is very small and, given the enormous expenses involved, will probably remain so.

• The gloss factor: The amount of dross and unfulfilled promises on the networks continues to increase with the bandwidth and the number of players. Although there are several reasons for this, the result is that it can be difficult to persuade neophytes (after their first Internet tour) that effort will be rewarded with more than banners, attractive logos, cute images, flashy links and big promises with little behind them. Students are more naturally attracted to a medium which resembles a video game than are staff, who can get frustrated by time-consuming hacking through the electronic undergrowth. The big search engines are clever and powerful, but they are blunt instruments without the finesse of true database searching methods - because, of course, there are no uniformly informative regular records out there on the Web, nor any agreed method for the ordering of the data.

• Heavyweight applications (1): The Internet is currently used by many people for 'shopfront' applications, where a jazzy front page is backed by only a few subsequent ones decked out with the odd image. This is fine and the technology supports the quick knocking-up of very presentable home pages - but will it stand heavyweight applications such as long academic papers, or even books? How about large databases? Or hypertext front-ends to large collections of books? I know of no front-ends for searching books which are much more sophisticated that that I offer on http://rubens.anu.edu.au (which is crude);

• Heavyweight applications (2): Examples of university-level courses (as distinct from on-line manuals, which are often very useful) which make use of the networks for anything more than document delivery are still thin on the ground because they take a long time to produce and are very costly. When they exist, will they succeed? And will they offer an education?

• Heavyweight applications (3): Hence, an independent and comprehensive assessment of the use of the Internet as a 'classroom without walls' would be useful because I would like to know (at the very lowest) whether my job is in danger of being replaced by a machine, or even whether the initial 'proof of concept' stage has been passed. What we all need is a long, cool look at the costs and (possible) benefits of using the Web in education. What we positively do not need is any more (a) preaching to the converted; (b) inflated estimates about what the Web can do for us; (c) underestimates of the enormous costs of doing it properly:

• Network access I: In many countries, this is the very area currently starved of speedy network access and machines and software to handle such access. In the brave new world of Australian education, we may have to sell our products in order to survive, and Australia is a very small market. If we are to move into Asia (the Drang nach Nordens of Paul Keating, former Prime Minister), then we shall need to produce many materials on CDROM, because the networks in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam are simply not fast enough for reliable learning.

• Network access II: Arguably, the education area where the Internet could most easily make important inroads in teaching/learning is in schools and colleges. It could well be that universities are better equipped than the schools themselves to produce such learning materials;

2 Suggestions For Action

• We should concentrate on providing a range of materials for learning, rather than materials for teaching - that is, passive data files (rather like books in a library - but multimedia books where possible) rather than programs which attempt to interact with and teach the student, which is what human beings have been doing quite well since at least the time of Plato. The Internet can help here, because of the ease with which threads can be provided by the teacher, Ariadne-like, through the amazing maze of cyberspace.

• We should generally steer clear of big projects, not only because they tend to be out-of-date before they are finished (whatever 'finished' means), but also because the 'stitch-together' capabilities of Internet servers and clients means that a meaningful amalgam of materials can so easily be woven - and my finished fabric will suit my students, and your different fabric will suit your students. In other words, monoliths are out.

• Equally, we should steer clear of grandiose notions of national and international cooperation. We have all seen attempts at the imposition of standards at higher levels than those necessary to ensure the interchange of data, but I don't see why Hong Kong or Hawaii or Hanover should do things my way, or vice versa. If I can access their materials, and have some kind of cogent help system to get me around, then I'm happy. Again, given the current power of networks and their interfaces, there is much less need than previously to ship datasets around the world: the Internet offers a form of electronic glue, or knitting!

• Copyright may eventually die out given the invasive anarchy of the Web. For the next few years, however, it will remain a problem, but one which need not prohibit activity. In some countries, such as Australia, it seems to be recognised that materials for teaching and learning, if restricted to the target audience, do not breach copyright by being copied.

• Collaborative efforts can in certain areas help to sidestep copyright, but certainly not to undermine it. I would encourage scholars to do as I have done in placing images from various disciplines on the Net, and waiving the copyright. But this will only work with things nobody owns, such as the outsides of buildings, or archaeological sites where photography is allowed. The insides of stately homes (for example), or everything in every museum presents huge problems and cuts off whole areas of art-historical imagery from the network - unless, that is, we can make do with reproducing photographs the copyright on which has expired - these being, of necessity, mostly monochromes. However, would that we could persuade the major museums and galleries of the world to contribute to the Net, if only by persuading them of the publicity advantages of going for bleeding-edge technology. If every museum in the world posted 100 images, copyright-free, then art historians and others who need such images would be in business immediately! An education campaign should convince such institutions that images at currently acceptable computer screen resolutions (say, video resolution) pose them no commercial problems since they are of insufficient quality to pirate and re-use for commercial gain.

• One dilemma, which will probably disappear in time, is whether authors should be encouraged to write materials in a format which makes them not only network-accessible, but useable over the network. Teaching packages tend at present to be firmly welded to one operating system and one platform (although they might exist in different versions for different platforms): is it feasible to think of teaching packages which are accessed over the Internet, and can we think of some development of clients to make them into more capable interfaces? 'Writing to a machine' rather than 'writing to the network' should speedily become a thing of the past for reasons of flexibility and ''updateability' as much as for reasons of cooperation and naked cost.

• Electronic publishing can be a crucial Trojan Horse in introducing things 'Webby' to university scholars, and therefore in promoting the Web as a respectable medium for publication. There are currently perceived problems with credibility, and these will not go away until all universities (promotions committees, booklists for students, scholarly books) treat the electronic world as just another medium, but one with possibilities not known in the world of print publishing.

3 Conclusion

The beauty of digital images is that they do not degrade, and that only one 'edition' of each is required, so long as it is available over the Web. Setup costs for digital imaging are high, and conversion from slides to nothing but digital images (somewhere in the future for all of us?) will undoubtedly be painful.

The question to be asked is: When will digital images be good enough? To which we can add the retort - For what? In my opinion, they are already fine for use in tutorials and seminars, and for private study by students, use in papers, etc. I lectured on 20th century Architecture in the first semester 1996 using nothing but 1.6 megapixel (and a few 1.2 megapixel) images, called up using a Web browser, and projected via a video projector. The results are excellent, but there is no denying the fact that the resolution is inferior to that of a 35mm slide

Appendix:
The Student Art History Server
at the Australian National University

My Department of Art History's ArtSurf server is separate from my public server, ArtServe, with its 19,000 images, or about 4.2Gb of data). ArtSurf currently holds images for four current Art History units, and several from previous years - a total of some 10,000 images, all accessible either by unit (that is, images seen each week), or by querying the database from a forms interface.

Procedures for the display and networking technology are now sufficiently well developed to make the accessing of decent-quality images across the network a possibility for teaching, because network access is now common and computer provision equally so. Mindful of the arguments about 'better in the future', and sceptical (but not cynical) about the actual value of the Internet in teaching and learning, the author began with a 'dry run' in early 1995, by making all images used in first-year classes available in digital form over the network using the Web, and accessed on a private page of ArtServe (because of copyright restrictions) via a simple database. This setup was used by students for private study. As well as being able to print out the images as aides memoire should they so wish, the annotation feature helps them augment their lecture notes, and their preparations for presenting their own seminars.

Such a study aid is an improvement on the cost of maintaining everyday access to the collection of 180,000+ slides, and may restrict damage to them, as well as mis-filing. We now (mid-1996) have on average four units per semester with all their images available on line - some 800Mb of data, or 11,000 images. Thus, for my 'Art & Architecture of the Italian Renaissance' unit (Semester 1 1995) I have scanned in (OCR) carefully out-of-copyright editions of Vasari and of Benvenuto Cellini's 'Autobiography', with selections from Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' to taste, for those students of a Spenglerian bent.

The use of such materials in lectures is now also possible with some preparation. Various lecture theatres are now equipped with video projectors which, as well as being used for videotapes, can also take output from a computer monitor. For my Architecture of our Century unit (first semester 1996) I took over a laptop (running Win95 and Linux) and accessed pre-formatted pages with thumbnail images and associated database records, stored on another machine. The students are provided with printouts of the same material. Clicking on the thumbnail image projects a 1.6 megapixel image via the video projector. This gives plenty of detail and clarity, and approaches (but does not equal) the quality of a 35mm slide - the more so since any digitised image gets reduced to video resolution (768x525) when it passes through the projector. A video image is about one-third of a megapixel, whereas the resolution of a 35mm slide perhaps approaches sixteen megapixels. So for lecturing purposes with current video resolution, there is something extremely perverse about digitising a 35mm slide and degrading its quality, and then using computer technology to display the image at something like one-fortieth of the resolution easily attainable through the 'old technology' of a slide projector. As a rough estimate, a good 35mm slide taken on low-grain film contains well over ten megapixels of data - a content which any computer would struggle to display or transmit to the Web, even if storage were not a problem.

However, the advantages of the new technologies - especially their ubiquity and 'reproduceability' - outweigh their disadvantages.

As well as offering pre-formatted pages with inline images for four of our undergraduate units (records plus thumbnails), students are able to interrogate the whole of the database. Thus, asking for architecture + italy or france + glass will bring up 216 records for the former, and 33 for the latter. The query returns pages formatted on the fly, with thumbnails and records as usual: clicking on the thumbnail brings up a larger image.

Because we believe that students should be encouraged to use the technology, we have also developed Image Quiz, which students can use to test themselves from the whole database, or from a subset. A separate Quiz has been set up for Modern Architecture. With this, students can choose - say - to be tested on 20th century architecture from America, and on the architecture, date and city. They can choose easy or difficult, and thereby monitor their own progress in the unit.

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