"Paradigm Shift" Participants

ABSTRACT
HyperImage is a software platform geared towards assisting researchers in image-based disciplines. Since its initial development, the software has gained in sophistication and relevance to the digital humanities in general and to art history in particular. HyperImage can be understood as a tool that supports the second wave of the digital humanities, as elucidated by Schnapp and Presner in the “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0”. The software allows users firstly to manage images and metadata from various external sources (e.g. image repositories) as well as from local storage media. Additionally, it supports the marking of regions in images and the linking of these regions to a diverse selection of link targets, be they other image regions, whole images, groups of images, text, etc. HyperImage thus visualises a web of discourse, simultaneously assisting scholars as a research tool and as a presentation tool. Semantic web technologies can be applied to the metadata and to the links between elements to permit researchers to mine the data contained in the system, while versions of a project can be made available to an audience for presentation, exploration and discovery. As the developers of this platform we have gained deep insights into the requirements of art historians. The new version of HyperImage will be presented and its functionality explored within the context of the digital humanities, especially with regard to art history. A sober approach to the technologies involved will be presented, exploring not only their affordances, but also their limitations within the broader context of scholarly discourse.