History of Art Criticism in nineteenth-century Chile: Digital humanities in the absence of memory

Abstract

The objective of the article is to highlight the extent to which the digital humanities can prove useful in studying the history of art criticism in Chile in the first half of the 19^th century. Given the limited number of primary sources pertinent to the question of whether thought was devoted to art in that period in Chile, the researcher is obliged to consider other, non-traditional sources, such as classified announcements of “artistic services” or translations of articles from the foreign press. To deal with this expanded pool of sources, the computerised tools of the digital humanities must be brought into play, seeing that not even teams with large numbers of researchers are sufficient to the task. The article concludes with a number of reflections on the implications of a quantitative study of how taste was formed in the period of the construction of the Nation-State, proposing a set of parameters for the analysis and formulation of cross-referenced charts able to contribute to the study of art criticism in the 19^th century.