Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous two posts. I’m still working these things out in my head, and am speaking from a very limited (and naive) perspective of only a handful of institutions and projects that I have seen.
One of the things I left out is that digital humanities centers are by no means the only entity that could help with digital projects or publications of art materials. This could also be accomplished through collaborations with other departments on campus (such as Computer Science) or through a university press. I imagine that we’ll probably start to see a number of these collaborations at the same time.
The part of this that is stuck in my brain, and which I don’t have an answer for, is what one of these projects would look like? I now have an idea of what a history or literature project looks like, but not much of what an art history or especially a fine art project would look like. I have seen a few examples of art history sites, and just presenting the images as one would in a book is somehow a bit of a letdown. But I don’t know what it is that I expect to be different. As for fine art- I have seen several fine art projects on the internet, and again, I always think something is somehow missing. I’m going to ponder this and research more and come up with some links and ideas.