Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning

How the use of machine learning to analyze art images has revived formalism in art history, presenting a golden opportunity for art historians and computer scientists to learn from one another.

Though formalism is an essential tool for art historians, much recent art history has focused on the social and political aspects of art. But now art historians are adopting machine learning methods to develop new ways to analyze the purely visual in datasets of art images. Amanda Wasielewski uses the...