method, opening the door to "distant viewing." Already well known in Comparative Literature as "distant reading," this method proceeds by subjecting vast numbers of cultural artifacts to quantitative computational analysis.

A troubling introduction to this method can be found in the first issue of the International Journal for Digital Art History, launched in June 2015. In the first of six articles, new media theorist Lev Manovich introduces five key terms from data science that he believes to be useful to art historians: object, features, data, feature space, and dimension reduction (Manovich 2015). His text is illustrated with examples of his own research projects that draw upon Big Data, including Selfiecity (visualizations of thousands of Instagram selfies in different cities around the globe, assessing the images in terms of age,a relationship to scientific research. Consider the network map produced by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for the exhibition "Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925" (2012–13), created by the curators in collaboration with a professor and a doctoral student at Columbia University’s business school.3 The map, an update of Barr’s well-known diagram for the catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), covered a wall at the entrance to the exhibition. On the exhibition website, the map allows users to click on various names, mapped geospatially from the West to the East, in order to see which artists were in contact with whom during this period. One positive outcome of this mapping was that several female artists, usually relegated to the sidelines, were repositioned as key players: Sonia Delaunay and Natalia