Digital Image Interview Series
Robert Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor, History of Art, Yale University

Robert Nelson studies and teaches medieval art at Yale University. He came to Yale in 2005, after a long and distinguished career at the University of Chicago. It was there that he started teaching with digital images, and he has not looked back. He is co-curator of the exhibition Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, on display at the Getty Museum through March 4, 2007.

Academic Commons: Let's start by asking about your own engagement with digital images.
Nelson: I'm very interested in this because I've written about the history of the slide lecture and so I'm actually quite interested in this transition.[1] The coming of slides transformed art history and I believe this will make not the same transition, the same revolution, but it's definitely going to make a big change.

Art history is frozen in a certain technological state. There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century. Whereas film went on to many other things - there were talking pictures, there were DVDs and many more manifestations, and now art history will move into that larger realm.

So how is it changing what you're doing in the classroom ?
Well it's changing many things. But first I'd like to say why I've made the switch. I told people when I first arrived here [2005] I'm not going to show a slide at Yale University. Come hell or high water, no matter what happens, I'm not going to show a slide at Yale University! So, I've completely made the switch. And the reason is that students learn much better. That is the most important reason.

I taught two courses in my last year [2004] at the University of Chicago, digitally, and my experience with what we used to call slide exams (where you show the slides and the students identify them) was really transformative. There really was no curve anymore. Everybody did A work. Everybody. Everybody got all the IDs perfect, basically. There were a few A-minuses but at first I thought, "Well clearly I've given too easy a slide exam," but then it happened the next time.

If, as we say, we want students to be able to remember and know images, and that is a claim we make because that's the way we examine students, then this is really contributing significantly to their education. And that happens because I put my PowerPoint lectures on a website somewhere and students just pore over the images - and it gives more or less perfect response. So that means we then need another way to ascertain who the best students are in the class.

So the base level is taken care of and you can move on?
Yes, you can move on. So what happens is that the visual information of art history is going to them seamlessly without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago, and that's very important. So that's why I'm making the switch.

Are you using images in much the same way that you used to use them in teaching?
Now well into my second year since I have shown a slide, I am forgetting the rigid format they impose. Since it is easy to repeat images and to change images quickly, I tend to show comparisons followed by single details. I now show more pictures or rather more details of the same number of basic images.

A particular delight is the ability to put up a quotation from a primary text for general class discussion. I like to give the students something that they have not read and to seek their reactions to it. I want them to apply their readings and the lectures to the quotation. This text is then made part of the course material that they prepare for exams.

I enjoy finding images on-line, especially of the current state of a monument, so as to bring the object into the ordinary experiences of today.

Do you still use the comparative method?
I do comparisons, to a certain extent. The problem is you're limited by screen size. But now you can see my technique evolving. I'm beginning now to show single images in relatively rapid succession and then when it comes time for a comparison I will downsize the crucial image, which they've seen in several different ways before, and then show comparisons. But whereas before with slides you'd always have an anchor slide (in my way of teaching it would always be on the left) and I would change other images on the right - but the anchor slide would always be there in full size. Now that's really changed and you have the capability of doing many more things. You can have more than one image up there, sometimes I have three.

Do you use zooming and panning features?
Not with the system I'm using - PowerPoint - it doesn't have those options. But I think what's more important is probably not the late-19th-century mechanics of presenting these images on a wall but the access to the Internet and the possibility of bringing music and all other kinds of media in. That is the important thing.

Now that I have a seminar room with all the technology working I can lecture off a website. In fact, I was just lecturing off a bibliographical website, one of the best you can get. Why give a handout, a bibliography, when it's on the web? It's right there up in front of them. I'm going to do a lot more of that. Being live is really useful.

Have you been able to use other media yet?
I really want to do that but haven't been able to do it smoothly. Recently I showed the students a very useful CD of a medieval manuscript and switched out of and back to PowerPoint. The process was not as smooth as I would like. Similarly getting on to the Internet in the classroom is still complicated, at least in the configuration we have at Yale at the present.

How are you adapting to using digital images?
Well, I'm taking to it. It is startling how much more time I have to spend on class preparation for someone who's taught for a long time. It's increased my prep time three-to-four fold. So, there's a very significant amount of time required here. But I know from having repeated a digital class that the next time you teach it there's almost no prep involved. In fact that's a danger - there's so little prep time that you think you're ready for class but in fact you're not. And you do still need to prepare. I only made that mistake once! But any way, you learn about these things.

Overall, in terms of a cost:benefit analysis it comes out on the positive side?
Overall, I'm very impressed. Very positive.

Tell me about the resources you use.
I take a lot of digital pictures when I travel; I'm a very heavy user of digital cameras and I take the largest possible file size - and that's transforming everything. Because I can now bring my personal experience of monuments into the classroom directly and relatively easily. (I have to downsize my 25MB images!)

Many years ago I had aspirations to be a photographer, so I've had experience with analog, so it wasn't so hard and I'm teaching myself. When I was working on an exhibition with the Getty Museum last year, my catalog essay was largely drawn from my own photographs. Some of the images in the exhibit are my photographs of the monastery, which were fairly easy but those of the liturgy had to be taken at night - not so easy.

What's the mix would you say between your use of images taken by yourself, images supplied by Yale and images found on the Web?
I'd say, 10% from the Web, 50% from Yale, and 40% of my own images.

Can you mix resources satisfactorily?
I use whatever I can get; I borrow things from the Internet, I use Google. Friends who've been doing this for a long time say there once was a golden age when you could get really high quality images on the Internet but now many of them have been taken off. In most cases you can't get access to high quality images. For me, the only one that consistently turns up useful images is Artserve, at the Australian National University http://rubens.anu.edu.au/.

You may have heard about the Getty Museum's initiative to make very high-resolution images and metadata of their collection available for harvesting and Ken Hamma's call for museums to freely share high-resolution digital images of public domain art?
What this will do is transform the canon. I can already see that it's transforming the canon of written texts, because it's perfectly clear in class that if you cite an article that's in a journal that JSTOR handles, it will be read by students and if not, it won't be. So the hierarchy of journals you publish in as a scholar has changed. I'm very much aware of this. I'd much rather put an article in a JSTOR journal than in a non-JSTOR journal, because it will be read. Now the same thing is going to happen with images - those images that are accessible digitally are going to be the canon that is taught and professed. So those museums that don't go into it, their material will be more easily forgotten. I'm not sure they're even aware of this. Museums are quite far behind technologically. It's shocking.

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[1] "The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art 'History' in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 3, Spring, 2000, pp. 414-434.