Description: 

The digital humanities project Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts is an online resource that aims to encourage and support sustained, interdisciplinary consideration  of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400-1750). Even as significant advancements have been made regarding the study of women as patrons, subjects, and producers of works of art in the Early Modern period during the last five decades, little attention has focused on the role of women as producers of material culture in the courts. The fully developed web-based platform of Global Makers will feature an open-access database; function as an interactive digital common for scholars; encourage study, collaborative research, and innovative approaches to the topic; and disseminate information to a broad audience. This peer-reviewed digital space will invite scholars to upload visual and textual resources – biographical, archival, and printed – into a database and will include a dynamic network visualization tool designed to highlight the connections between objects, artists, patrons, and materials. The network features will function as a catalyst, charting new directions for research. In this talk, we will discuss the development of a crowd-sourced database using metadata element sets such as FOAF and Dublin Core on the Omeka-S platform, and our attempt at the creation of a network visualization/network mapping tool to illuminate relations between the metadata items. 

About the Presenters:

Tanja Jones is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Alabama where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Renaissance and Baroque art. She has published extensively on Pisanello and the earliest cast bronze portrait medals produced in Italy. Her current book-length project, Pisanello’s Medals: Dynasty, Destiny, and Crusade, addresses the emergence of the cast bronze portrait medal in the 1430s and the political, religious, and ideological value the small-scale sculpted form conveyed. She also co-directs  the multi-faceted, digital humanities project Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts, and published an related, edited volume, Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (1450-1700) with Amsterdam University Press in 2021.

Doris Sung is Assistant Professor of Art History at UA where she teaches the Arts of Asia. Her research focuses on early modern, modern and contemporary art of East Asia, cultural interactions between Asia and Europe, and gender and visual culture. She is co-PI of the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts project. Before coming to UA, she was a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, and a visual artist. She had also worked on the digital humanities project title “A New Approach to the Popular Press in China: Gender and Cultural Production, 1904–1937” - a multilingual database of women's magazines published in early twentieth-century China.

Becky Teague is an instructor of Art History at the University of Alabama and Shelton State Community College. She earned her MA at UA in 2019, and she recently completed an MLIS at the same institution specializing in archival studies. Her interest areas include Renaissance Italy, fifteenth-century sculpture, and the representation of women and minorities in the early modern period.

Additional Resources: 

http://globalmakers.ua.edu/