Current Multicampus Research Groups

Early Modern Patterns: Tracking Cultural Forms in the Digital Age

This research group will investigate new, digital and web-based interactive and collaborative approaches to studying pattern networks in the Early Modern Atlantic world. The generation, reuse, circulation and dispersal of patterns – visual, musical, and textual – was a particularly widespread phenomenon in this period, which saw the rise of new media, such as printing, but also the refinement of older workshop methods of replication to serve growing markets in cultural goods. Growing out of a single workshop or publishing house, models traveled and became reformed and reinterpreted by very different users over many generations and in new cultural settings. The working premise is that this is an area of the humanities that can particularly benefit from web-based and digital study. The group comprises at its core two established collaborative websites, janbrueghel.org and colonialart.org, which study these questions in the visual arts of Northern Europe and the Spanish New World. Working with them is a group of six scholars at four campuses whose research also involves digital projects in this period that raise similar issues of collaborative scholarship and historical patterning. A key goal is not only to help grow a group of innovative websites in this area, but to explore together issues of collaboration and crowdsourcing, fair use of historical materials, long-term financing and maintenance of open-access research websites, and how collaborative web-based work can be evaluated as part of our scholarly activity.

Faculty PIs: Mary Elizabeth Honig, Art History, UC Berkeley
Almerindo Ojeda, Linguistics, UC Davis