Making the Absent Present: The Imperative of Teaching Art History
Since its emergence in 2005 as a free and open online resource for instructors, students, and the general public, Smarthistory has made numerous groundbreaking changes and advances for better teaching and more engaged learning. Playing upon the theme "making the absent [art work] present," we explain how Smarthistory's lively dialogic pedagogy combined with a rich variety of image views, reconstructions, google street views, diagrams, and essays has successfully replaced the traditional dependence on an art history text for many instructors. The result is an enhanced experiential and contextual experience for the student. For a discipline whose works were often accessible only in textbook photographs, Smarthistory has made art history literally come alive for students. We also discuss how Smarthistory has encouraged collaboration from hundreds of art historians, nurtured open online publishing opportunities, and broadened our ability to address a broad range of non western art. Absence and presence Teaching art history is a great joy, and making it accessible to the greatest number of people is, we feel, a moral imperative. Those of us who teach art history know how easily students fall in love with our discipline, and that it has the power to increase respect for distant cultures and enhance critical thinking about the images students confront everyday. But we face significant challenges when we teach art history (and publish art history) As Stephen Murray noted, "The paradox in the enterprise of the professor of art history is that we spend most of our time as teachers in the classroom talking about what is not there the absent work of art, represented by a surrogate image projected onto a screen." This is no small challenge to face each week of the semester. While it's relatively easy to read Dickens just about anywhere, a work of art is best seen in person. Every time we enter the classroom, as Murray suggests, we attempt the impossible to conjure a work of art and the culture that once surrounded it. Smarthistory (smarthistory.org) was created to help with this somewhat absurd activity to make the absent present. In 2005, Smarthistory began as an effort to support students in the Western art history survey courses we were teaching. As our content, roster of contributors, and audience grew, Smarthistory began to receive both awards and funding. From the outset, we wanted Smarthistory to support global art history. A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the years 2015 and 2016 to accelerate content creation, with an emphasis on art from Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Islamic World, and Oceania, allowed us to 1 Stephen Murray, "The Crisis in Art History," Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 27:4 (2011) 316. 1 Harris and Zucker: Making the Absent Present: The Imperative of Teaching Art History Published by CUNY Academic Works, 2016 significantly broaden our content and contributors and to demonstrate our commitment to supporting global art history. To make the "absent work of art" present, we use just about every tool at our disposal. Smarthistory videos start with an audio recording of a conversation that takes place on site and includes ambient sound (the muffled voices in a museum, the echo of a cathedral, or the birds at a hilltop shrine) Art historians describe not just the art and its history, but the experience of viewing. Smarthistory includes, wherever possible, digital reconstructions, embedded Google Street views, Photospheres, custom made diagrams, and dozens of highresolution images (some annotated) made available, wherever possible, with a Creative Commons license via Flickr. See, for example, the essay on the Lakshmana Temple. Utilizing multiple views and details of an object (in a video or essay) allows art historians to model the process of close, extended examination of an object. Rika Burnham, Head of Education at the Frick Collection, has written about close looking and the unfolding of time in the museum: Looking at a work of art involves a series of actions scanning its surface, grasping it as a whole, focusing on details, thinking and reflecting on them, pausing to look again, reconsidering the whole in relation to its parts, and so on. In the end, everything should come together, with the experience of the artwork unified in an expanded whole. As Burnham suggests, this process is perhaps the most important skill we can teach our introductory students, whether that's in a classroom, a museum, or online. Audience and effectiveness So what do we know about who uses Smarthistory and about its effectiveness? We know that, while Smarthistory is a resource for many informal learners, it is primarily used by students and their instructors in undergraduate art history surveys and more specialized courses, as well as in high school Advanced Placement art history and history courses. These students often find the resource on their own via a Google search but might also find Smarthistory on their syllabus or in the instructions for an assignment. Some instructors play the videos during class time as a prompt for discussion. Numerous college and university libraries, including those like the University of South Africa outside the United States, feature Smarthistory in their research guides. Graduate students rely on Smarthistory to study for their comprehensive exams. And we also know, from what we hear in the field, that it's not just students who use Smarthistory; instructors also use the resource to refresh their knowledge and to identify potential teaching strategies, which is critically important when 2 Cristin McKnight Sethi, "Sacred space and symbolic form at Lakshmana Temple, Khajuraho (India)" in Smarthistory, May 15, 2016, accessed September 29, 2016, http:/smarthistory.org/lakshmana temple/ 3 Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai Kee, "The Art of Teaching in the Museum," in Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience, Getty Publications (2011) 16. 2 Art History Pedagogy Practice, Vol. 1 [2016] Iss. 1, Art. 4 https:/academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol1/iss1/4 teaching outside of one's own specialty. As Dr. Bryan Zygmont wrote, "I believe Smarthistory is as profound of a benefit to art history professors and teachers, too. We just pretend we don't need it." This large base of users is evident from weekly and seasonal fluctuations in pageviews. Summer and late December/January are significantly slower periods than September December and February May. Weekly usage peaks Monday Thursday and is slowest on Fridays and Saturdays. Surveys taken by a faculty member at a large California State University campus in 2015 and 2016 of two introductory art history sections and shared informally with Smarthistory found that 22 out of 25 students preferred Smarthistory over the textbook, one had no preference, and two preferred the textbook. When asked about their experience with Smarthistory, students mentioned that, in comparison to the assigned textbook, Smarthistory content offered a more in depth experience and conveyed more information. One student wrote: Personally, I did not enjoy having to use the course textbook. I thought It was kind of a waste, because I didn't get much out of it, because of how brief the summaries were. I would like something more in depth with the subject. Plus, it was pricey, and [it] felt more like a chore having it around. This same student went on to say of Smarthistory, "I liked the fact I could listen to the visual analysis and history that was narrated by the two speakers." Then added that Smarthistory ".improved my grades after using it." Over the years we have received hundreds of similar comments (and even a video) Comments provide evidence of a student's perception of their own learning, and what emerges, unmistakably, is that most students and instructors who comment find that Smarthistory helps them learn and makes the experience of learning more pleasurable. Key themes that emerge from an analysis of student and instructor comments include: 1. Enhanced focus while studying and a perception of increased retention (Smarthistory is consistently described as enjoyable, helpful, effective, and interactive) 2. A higher level of interest in the subject matter 3. A deeper understanding of the subject (students regularly noted that Smarthistory provided more information than the textbook) 4. Improved grades Students also consistently express appreciation that Smarthistory is free and point to the value of videos in combination with essays and quizzes as being particularly helpful. One student wrote, "There is a lot of information to learn and remember, and I feel as if the videos were a great way to break that information down, step by step." Our own analysis of user analytics 4 Bryan Zygmont, "Smarthistory is for professors and instructors too." Smarthistory blog, July 26, 2015; https:/smarthistoryblog.org/2015/07/26/smarthistory is for professors and instructors too/ 3 Harris and Zucker: Making the Absent Present: The Imperative of Teaching Art History Published by CUNY Academic Works, 2016 shows, though, that essays are accessed just as frequently as videos based upon the number of views and learner comments indicate that one reinforces the other. A comparison of a Smarthistory video with its equivalent entry in a textbook may explain these perceptions. A transcript of Smarthistory's video on the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens is more than twice the length of the entries in Janson's History of Art and Gardner's Art Through the Ages roughly 1300 versus 550 words. But perhaps more importantly, the Smarthistory video uses over fifty high resolution photographs and diagrams and this doesn't count an additional Smarthistory video that focuses on the caryatid and Ionic column from the Erechtheion in The British Museum. The most recent edition of the textbook, Janson's History of Art, represents the Erechthe