How Digital Technology Opened New Avenues of Research for a Graduate Student Studying Satirical Art in the French Revolution

Kathryn Desplanque, a PhD candidate in art history at Duke, works with a massive collection of almost 500 images from late-18th and early-19th century France: satirical images aimed at depicting the art world of Paris around the time of the French Revolution. But how does academia tend to treat these images?

Desplanque argues that this satirical art should be afforded the same level of analysis and interpretation as other forms of traditionally cultured art. She also shares how she uses nVivo, a data analysis app, to catalog this collection for her upcoming dissertation, "Art, Commerce, and Caricature: Satirical Images of Artistic Life in Paris, 1750-1850."

The PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) provides an arena in which PhD and MFA students involved in the humanities and interpretive social sciences can learn about new digital scholarship, engage with its challenges, and see its promise for their own research and professional lives within or outside the university.

This is the first of a series of videos exploring how humanities are using digital technologies in their studies.