Digital Publishing for Art History

The Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History hosts an international conference exploring the rapidly evolving landscape of digital publishing in art history. Moving beyond theoretical possibilities, this two-day event focuses on concrete, reproducible digital methods and real-world implementations. Generously supported by the DFG, this forum addresses the critical gap between FAIR data principles and their practical implementation in scholarly publishing.

The conference brings together scholars, digital humanities practitioners, and publishing innovators to share practical workflows, infrastructures, and technological approaches for art historical research and publication.

Program Highlights

The conference features three thematic sessions across two days:

Data for Digital Publishing explores encoding methodologies, knowledge graphs, and semantic resources, including presentations on Ethiopian manuscript iconography, CIDOC-CRM natural language interfaces, and structured query generation using LLMs.

Workflows for Digital Publishing showcases production pipelines and collaborative infrastructures, featuring talks on IIIF integration, Zotero as a semantic platform, digital epigraphy cooperation, and annotation systems for art historical research.

Beyond Digital Publishing examines future trajectories, including generative art style exploration, AI remediation of web content, and hybrid edition enrichment.

Program

Thursday 23.10.2025

9:00 Registration

9:15 Opening (Tristan Weddigen, Director, BHMPI)

9:30 Panel: Data for Digital Publishing -> https://vimeo.com/event/5414273

• Encoding the Sacred: A Digital Approach to Iconography, Motif Variation, and Artistic Recensions in First-Gondarine-style illuminated manuscripts of the Ethiopian Miracles of Mary (Guesh Solomon Teklu¹ & Pietro Maria Liuzzo², 1. Universität Hamburg, 2. BHMPI)

• Contextual Resources for Digital Publishing (Klaus Werner, BHMPI)

• Querying Art Historical Knowledge Graphs: a Natural Language Interface for Exploring CIDOC-CRM Data Using LLM (Nicola Carboni, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

• Leveraging LLMs for Structured Query Generation in Digital Humanities (Elena Spadini, University of Bern)

14:00 Panel: Workflows for Digital Publishing -> https://vimeo.com/event/5414278

• Publink, adapting a project idea to production workflow (Christopher Tomlinson, BHMPI)

• Digital Publishing @ Hertziana (Elisa Bastianello, BHMPI)

• Metrica – reuse and cooperation in digital epigraphy (Silvia Evangelisti¹ & Pietro Maria Liuzzo², 1. Università degli studi di Foggia, 2. BHMPI)

• Zotero as Semantic Publishing Platform (Christoph Sander, Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom)

• Image annotation between research and scientific publishing at INHA: PENSE and PerVisum projects (Juliette Hueber¹, Federico Nurra², & Margaux Faure², 1. CNRS-INHA, 2. INHA)

Friday 24.10.2025

9:00 Registration

10:00 Panel: Beyond Digital Publishing -> https://vimeo.com/event/5414284

• Echoes of Style: Interactive Exploration and Interpolation of Generative Art Styles (Carlos Vivar Rios & Hannah Laureen Casey, Swiss Data Science Center)

• Mapping Publications: A Trajectory Beyond Digital Publishing (Dario Rodighiero, University of Groningen)

• AI remediation of the web, or what does publishing zero-click content mean? (Alessio Antonini, The Open University)

• Enrichment of hybrid editions as playground for editorial workflows (Reto Baumgartner, University of Zurich)

14:30 Roundtable & Demos: Digital Publishing and Art History
Discussants:

Alessandro Adamou, Alessio Antonini, Elisa Bastianello, Reto Baumgartner, Nicola Carboni, Hannah Laureen Casey, Silvia Evangelisti, Margaux Faure, Juliette Hueber, Pietro Maria Liuzzo, Federico Nurra, Carlo Teo Pedretti, Dario Rodighiero, Sabina Rosenbergova, Christoph Sander, Elena Spadini, Guesh Solomon Teklu, Christopher Tomlinson, Carlos Vivar Rios & Klaus Werner.