This coming summer, metaLAB will be hosting a two-week workshop for art historians, scholars of visual culture, and museum professionals at all career stages on the topic of Beautiful Data: Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation, the workshop will introduce participants to the concepts and skills necessary to make use of open collections to develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital publication, and data-driven, and object-oriented teaching.

Rather than providing an overall survey of digital art/humanities skills, tools, and resources, the workshop is intended as a hands-on experience, enabling art and cultural historians and museum professionals to work side-by-side within three broad domains that are central to metaLAB’s own research: critical and expressive practices of collections visualization (the critically informed use of visualization tools for analysis, communication and storytelling); digital curation, interpretation and argumentation (methods of multimedia narration that leverage open collection data and tools); and collections-centered work across the analog/digital divide (bringing 3D art objects into the digital realm, bringing digital collections content into the analog realm so as to enhance the experience of individual art objects, and rendering visible the families of objects to which they belong).

The dates of the workshop are June 16 — June 27, 2014. All participants will receive a stipend covering housing

and travel expenses.

Admission is on a competitive basis.

The online application can be filled out at http://metalab.harvard.edu/apply/