When the University of Texas at Dallas announced in July a $17 million endowed gift to establish the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, it raised questions about how the university would try to leave its mark on the study of art in the 21st century.
Some of those questions remain unanswered because they are still recruiting professors and grad students for the research.
But to help understand the kind of advanced data analysis the institute was founded to promote, I recently visited with Dr. Maximilian Schich, associate professor of arts and technology at UTD.
You may recognize some of Schich’s work. The video above was released by Nature when the magazine published some of his research on migration patterns of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The video was widely shared on social media and has been viewed more than 850,000 times on YouTube in the last two months.
Schich plans to use similar techniques to answer new questions in the field of art history. You can read more about them in my story this week.
Richardson/Lake Highlands/Far North Dallas editor Daniel Houston can be reached at 214-977-8024.