Abstract

While digital literary studies are well established, digital art history is only taking its first baby steps. As distant reading has contributed to revolutionizing traditional literary studies, distant viewing is lagging behind. Machines are taking their first looks at visual artworks in the research projects that, at this stage, are confusingly bordering domains of computer science and art history. This essay attempts to better demarcate these borders by looking at possible questions that are both art-historical in nature and impossible or hard to answer without computational techniques. For this task, we compare the distant reading with distant viewing and explore the experience of the “older sister” discipline of digital literary studies.