Mapping Art History: Enhancing the Teaching of German Art History with Student-Created Maps

While art history students frequently are required to write research papers, they often have trouble understanding some of the more abstract constructs they encounter. They may struggle to grasp the role that research plays in probing questions about the relationships between people, places, and events that compose complex historical periods. This article describes a collaboration between an art history professor, a librarian, and a digital humanities specialist in which students were taught how to conduct research for an art history course on German art 1900 to the present and then visualize that research through story maps created with ArcGIS. Through these mapping projects, students were encouraged to engage with the history of German art on a physical level by mapping spatial relationships between social networks, artists’ studios, exhibition venues, art museums, architecture, and other important historical sites that were integral to the development of major art movements. This case study article outlines the project, including its learning outcomes, pedagogical strategies, student products, and assessment data. In addition, it describes how the project developed through different iterations. Ultimately, this collaborative, interdisciplinary project may provide a model for ways that visualization in general and map creation in particular can be used as a teaching strategy to make art history come alive for students by opening new conceptual territory, prompting intriguing questions, generating unique answers, and engaging art history in a more physical, spatial manner.