Making WAIVS Workshop

Making WAIVS is a one-day workshop designed to introduce philosophers, art historians, art educators, and museum administrators to the potential that digital image analysis tools might hold for their practices. WAIVS or Workflows for the Analysis of Images in Visual Stylometry is designed to support the use of digital image analysis techniques by researchers in the humanities with little to no computer science background. The workshop will introduce participants to the field of visual stylometry through a series of hands-on exercises using WAIVS. Visual stylometry is a new field that lies at the intersection of art, cognitive science, computer science, and the digital humanities. Researchers in this field use digital image analysis tools to study the image features and image statistics of artistic style. This information can be used to classify paintings by era, school, individual artist within a school, technique, or period within the body of work of an individual artist, and to provide insight into the unique ways that different painters communicate through the subject matter or medium.

Speakers at the workshop include Fitchburg Art Museum Director or Curator, Daniel J. Graham (Psychology of Art, Hobart & William Smith College), Yolanda Gil (Computer Science, University of Southern California), and Charlene Villasenor Black (Art History, UCLA). More information can be found at waivs.org.

* Making WAIVS is funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant (Award HD-248360-16), an American Society for Aesthetics Major Projects Initiative Grant, and the generous support of the Fitchburg Art Museum.

Co-Presented with the Fitchburg Art Museum

Registration is Free.