Founder and Director of the Institute for Digital Heritage

The Institute for Digital Heritage opens access to digital information about culture, artifacts, traditions and materiality to empower engagement, learning and knowledges. Make data accessible: We work with information that institutions, museums and communities collect as data to make digital materials accessible to a broader audience. Connect multiplicity: We connect knowledges between institutions, communities and international audiences. Elevate voices: We open data silos and elevate underrepresented narratives and materials. We encourage research of digital information that are stored in institutions, documented in local communities and collected by individuals.

Principal Investigator and Project Leader for Digital Benin

Digital Benin brings together all objects, historical photographs and rich documentation material from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artefacts from Benin Kingdom looted in the late nineteenth century. The historic Benin objects are an expression of Benin arts, culture and history, and were originally used as royal representational arts, to depict historical events, to communicate, to worship and perform rituals. The digital platform introduces new scholarship which connects digital documentation about the translocated objects to oral histories, object research, historical context, a foundational Edo language catalogue, provenance names, a map of the Benin Kingdom and museum collections worldwide. Digital Benin connects data from 5,246 objects across 131 institutions in 20 countries.

Dr. Anne Luther is the project catalyst. She ensured that all participants were on the same page according to timeline, design, technical development and research goals. She defined the overall operations strategy and set the development direction based on her years of experience as a research manager at the Center for Data Arts at the New School in New York and as a PI and catalyst for various digital projects with museums internationally. Her knowledge of digital project development standards was used to comply with regulatory requirements and ensure the operation and security of all services. Luther has an in-depth, advanced understanding of various digital platforms, protocols and related technical standards critical to the operation of the digital platform. She led the team in assessing all changes and improvements and achieving strategic goals. Furthermore, she took the lead role in the testing and evaluation of new and enhanced developments. She liaised among various stakeholders for project and operation needs and communicated with all institutions for the acquisition and transfer of data, answering legal negotiations and building partnerships with the institutions. Luther collaborated with the technical lead, researchers, PIs and external scholars and consultants. She set standards and requirements for equipment needs and implemented procedures to ensure maximum uptime and quality. She also maintained and defined budgetary needs and established, maintained and negotiated institutional partnerships. She worked with the technical team on the overall development approach for the platform and established the metadata structure for linking the diverse datasets.

Mellon Regional Fellow at the PriceLab for Digital Humanities, UPenn

The Price Lab at the University of Pennsylvania offers twelve Andrew W. Mellon DH Fellowships. The fellowships are intended to serve as a gateway into the digital humanities for Penn faculty and regional researchers, and as a way to build a broad and diverse community of scholars excited to explore the potential of new digital tools in their fields. Dr. Anne Luther is working on integrating digitized material from the Penn Museum into Digital Benin and is contributing with a proposal development to the PriceLab rigorous research community in the fellowship year 2021-2022.

Research Manager at the Center for Data Arts, The New School

The Center for Data Arts is a New School research lab and creative studio that produces media installations, open-source software, and multimodal experiences in which data is treated as a subject and a medium for research and design. The center critically explores dimensions of information technology, including data privacy, infrastructure and development. Dr. Anne Luther lead the research team with a focus in museum data between 2015-2018.

Research Fellow at Translocations, TU Berlin

Dr. Anne Luther introduced digital provenance research to the cluster and developed a teaching and research concept for digital art history and digital humanities during her fellowship in 2018/2019. She secured funding for a data sprint with the Pitt Rivers Museum and invited an international group of researchers, designers and developers to the TU Berlin to explore the entire internal database of the museum through data visualization and exploration. Dr. Anne Luther co-founded The International Art Market Association Sub-Committee in Berlin during her time at the TU Berlin.

Research Fellow at Parsons Institute for Information Mapping

Dr. Anne Luther developed the software The Entity Mapper at PIIM and secured funding for continuous research in qualitative data visualization between 2013-2015. She wrote a concept for a research lab for Qualitative Data Visualization and was shortlisted for the Information is Beautiful Award. The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) is a Research, Development, and Professional Services facility within The New School and located in New York City. PIIM's mission is to advance the field of Knowledge Visualization through academic and commercial pursuits. PIIM researchers and staff disseminate their expertise in information categorization, knowledge representation, information taxonomy development, information logic and ranking/scoring, knowledge visualization, and Graphic User Interface (GUI) and User Experience Design (UXD) by developing powerful tools and methods for decision makers and analysts.

PhD at Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation

The University of the Arts London Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation is a forum for historical, theoretical and practice-based research in architecture, art, communication, craft and design. Dr. Anne Luther received her PhD at Central Saint Martins in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Deborah Cherry and Andrew Marsh, where she developed a pioneering interactive data visualization software for qualitative research for her dissertation Collecting Contemporary Art: a visual analysis of a qualitative investigation into patterns of collecting and production.

Mapping Exhibition Networks: Current histories of biennials

No more than ten in number around the early 1990s, today hundreds of biennials take place more or less regularly around the world, becoming the standard format for producing and displaying contemporary art. These periodic art exhibitions are usually thematic, as well as conceptual and socially interventionist. Their significant increase in number and geographical dispersal is a phenomenon that fully partakes in the global flows of objects, discourses and people, the expansion of neoliberal economic structures as well as urban development, social engineering, and city branding. The study of internationally active artistic and curatorial networks has not yet been systematically pursued. This inquiry seeks to contribute in this direction, by surveying current exhibition networks.

Dr. Anne Luther participated in the Network Analysis + Digital Art History Workshop, generously funded by the Getty Foundation through its Digital Art History initiative at the University of Pittsburgh.

NeoCollections at MK&G Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Between April 17 and 21, 2023 the in-person data sprint launched collaborations between scholars and practitioners interested in exploring the entire collection’s data of the MK&G. In the format of a data-centered workshop collaborators from the museum, scholars, designers and developers explored MK&G’s database and other data sources through digital methods and precise research questions that will give insights into the institution as a whole. Over the course of an intensive week software prototypes, data visualizations and data explorations were produced collaboratively around topics of data and language biases, machine learning and AI, meta-data explorations and provenance.

The workshop is organized in collaboration with the Institute for Digital Heritage and lead by Dr. Anne Luther.

Activating Museum Data for Research and Public Engagement

From September 30 to October 3 2019, researchers from art history, developers, designers and museum staff of various institutions came together at in the Department of Modern Art History at the Technical University of Berlin to create a datasprint in collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum of Oxford University entitled "Activating Museum Data for Research, Scholarships and Public Engagement". The museum gave all the collected data from the museum's database to the group, which was transcribed since its creation and digitally collected in the museum's database. The diversity of the data, which is mainly due to non-standardized formats became a focus of all groups, as it revealed the history of the digital archive and lead new questions to the collection of the museum. This is the second data sprint in collaboration with the Médialab at Sciences Po in Paris.

Dr. Anne Luther secured funding from the Volkswagen Stiftung, organized and lead the Data Sprint.

Activating Museum Data for Research and Public Engagement

The Médialab at Sciences Po in Paris and the Center for Data Arts at The New School in New York City organized a data sprint in Paris in Fall 2017 with the Centre Pompidou. The three institutions are interested in exploiting databases of cultural material to pave the way for new research tools in contemporary art history.

Dr. Anne Luther lead the collaboration for the Center for Data Arts.

ENTITY MAPPER

The ENTITY MAPPER is an open source web application for visualizing qualitative data as an interactive node-link diagram. By abstracting away the time-consuming process of constructing a visualization manually, the tool allows the researcher to focus on deriving insights from their data through an instant upload format. It features user authentication, dataset caching, and an integrated administration interface for dataset management.

Dr. Anne Luther developed the software as part of her PhD research.

Dr. Anne Luther taught Art Theory as a TA for Professor Boris Groys at NYU between 2014 and 2017. She translated his book Logic of the Collection published with MIT Press/Sternberg Press (2021) and organized the conference Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism at HKW Berlin.
Courses:

• Theory of Avant-Garde: East & West 1890-1930 [undergraduate]

• Hegel, Kojeve, & The End of History [graduate]

• Theories of Symbolic Exchange [undergraduate]

• Under the Gaze of Others [graduate]

• Theories of Symbolic Exchange [undergraduate]

• Russian Biopolitical Imagination [graduate]
  

Ethnography, Data and Healthcare Innovation [UTNS 5104 - 2017]

In this course students will learn how to make connections between everyday behaviors, business drivers and technological innovation to tackle and solve real world problems. Using health care and life sciences as our area of focus, students will specifically study the challenges of managing and navigating multiple health conditions, or multi-chronic illnesses, within today’s health system and digital market. The course will expose students to a variety of humanistic approaches and qualitative methods to frame insights into strategy and solutions. We will first deconstruct industry transformations and how they relate to social phenomena; then move into methods to derive insights that will lead to opportunities, strategies, practical models, and supporting narratives. The course will include a strong emphasis upon the role that data plays in shaping new protocols and practices as they relate to patient privacy, empowerment, and experiences. Dr. Anne Luther taught data and research ethics with a focus on qualitative methods.