Emily Pugh / Digital Art History at the Getty Research Institute

In this presentation, Dr. Emily Pugh will present brief overviews of two projects she oversees in her role Principal Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles. The first of these is “Photography Unbound,” a project that uses computer vision to analyze a corpus of 30,000 nineteenth-century photographs, drawn from photo albums in collections located in the US, Asia, and Europe. The second, “Understanding the Architectural Model,” explores the use of 3D imaging to provide access to the GRI’s collection of over 800 architectural models. Together, these projects demonstrate the opportunities and challenges digital technologies offer art historical and cultural heritage research, while also illustrating the ways their use shapes (or reshapes) scholarly practice.

Emily Pugh is a Principal Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where she oversees the GRI’s Digital Art History Program. Emily is active as a specialist in digital art history and as a historian of postwar architecture. Her expertise within digital art history centers on the digital media of art history and its related infrastructures, which encompasses the digitization of physical materials, 3D scanning, computer vision, as well as collections metadata and its related workflows and processes. Her work in architecture and digital art history has been supported by the Center for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland, the European Architectural History Network, and the Humboldt University in Berlin where she served as the 2022–23 Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor.

Image: John Thomson, Clapham Common Industries: Photography on the Common, April 2, 1877.