CFP: Digital Dialogues

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art invites proposals for Digital Dialogues, an exploration of “the current landscape of digital scholarship and emerging technologies” edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli, PhD and Kaylee P. Alexander, PhD. From their 2027 call for proposals:

In both personal and professional settings, responsibilities are ever-increasing for scholars working at the intersections of academic practice, data archives, and museum collections. At their foundational core, the technologies developed to aid us are meant to consolidate workflows, streamline communication, and facilitate new skills and approaches. Technological convenience, however, can come with inherent challenges that may not be immediately apparent to the user. What happens when new systems needlessly complicate divisions of labor, impede collaboration, or limit creative expression? How can humanists better support, advocate, and mediate digital knowledges for the broader field of American art and visual culture?

Themes/projects can include:

• Machine learning and AI: As machine learning tools are increasingly used for image recognition, metadata generation, provenance research, or audience analytics, what new
  forms of labor, oversight, or ethical scrutiny do these tools demand of art historians and museum professionals—and who bears responsibility when the technology gets it wrong?
• Pedagogy and digital literacy: How are art history and museum studies curricula adapting to prepare students for a field increasingly mediated by digital tools and AI systems, and what tensions arise between teaching traditional connoisseurship or archival methods and training students in data literacy or computational approaches?
• Collections management systems: How do collections management systems (e.g., TMS, PastPerfect, EMu) shape—or constrain—the way registrars, curators, and archivists
  describe, categorize, and narrate objects, and what happens when institutional data standards conflict with an object’s cultural or historical complexity?
• Digital exhibitions and catalogues raisonnés: In what ways do digital and virtual exhibition platforms or digital catalogues raisonnés expand access to collections, and in what ways might they inadvertently flatten the interpretive nuance, spatial context, or embodied experience that in-person encounters with art provide?
• Labor and institutional hierarchy: How do decisions about adopting new technologies get made within museums and academic departments, and how might the burden of learning, implementing, or troubleshooting these systems fall unevenly across curatorial, registrarial, IT, and administrative staff?
• Access and equity: Who is included—and who is left out—when museums and archives prioritize digital-first strategies, whether in terms of staff technical capacity, institutional funding, audience access, or the digitization priorities placed on certain collections over others?
• Creative and interpretive labor: In what ways might algorithmically driven tools (recommendation engines, automated tagging, generative AI for interpretive text) influence
  or constrain the interpretive voice and creative authority of curators, educators, and scholars?

Deadline for expressions of interest: January 15, 2027
Please submit a proposed title, brief topic description, and anticipated format (see below) by email to keidra.navaroli@ucf.edu and kaylee.alexander@utah.edu. Applicants will be notified by January 22, 2027. Those invited to contribute will be asked to submit a draft by March 1, 2027.

Submission formats include:

• Essays & Critical Reviews (1,500–2,000 words): In-depth analyses of emerging technologies, computational methodologies, or born-digital initiatives in the field of American art and art history.
• Field Notes (500–1,000 words): Responses to technological developments, digital ethics, pedagogical experiments, academic labor, or shifts in contemporary artistic practice or art historical methods.

Panorama is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication dedicated to American art and visual culture (broadly defined)