This web publication marks the second Centennial celebration of The Art Bulletin, which may rightly claim several beginnings. The first centennial celebration in 2011 marked the occasion of the foundation of the College Art Association in 1911, for which Natalie Boymel Kampen, then Chair of the Editorial Board, compiled a “Centennial Anthology” of board members’ favorite articles for the College Art Association website. Many of these articles mark key moments in the intellectual development of the discipline of art history; all reflect the social, structural, and infrastructural development of the journal.  Explicit, directed involvement with the formation of the discipline is evident from the very first issues as has been noted recently in several venues. The Centennial Session, “Celebrating The Art Bulletin,” held during the 2011 annual conference looked back to articles published during the early decades of the journal’s existence and to the past two decades.  In addition, Susan Ball, executive director emerita, edited a volume of essays on the history of CAA, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, in which Craig Houser considered the history of The Art Bulletin along with the full slate of CAA’s scholarly publications. Following those activities, it seemed appropriate to explore new possibilities for scholarly publication on the occasion of the journal’s centennial.

In celebration of the centennial year of the first issue in 1913, and building upon the foundations of the “Centennial Anthology” compiled in 2011, we feature three articles in two different formats toward your consideration of The Art Bulletin’s digital future. “Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future,” presents these articles as they may be found in the journal's current online format as pdf documents, that is as scans of the print journal accessible via Jstor, and as the articles might be read in the tablet format that is popular now. We take a further step with the most recent article from 1993 to imagine how it might look if published online today with technologies presently in development. You may look back at the development of the print journal through an interactive timeline in which all Table of Contents are grouped by decade; changes in format and content are noted by year.

To a great extent, this is an exercise in form and function, tracing some of the ways by which the journal came to take its present form in print to serve the purposes it serves now, and asking what forms the journal might take to serve the future needs of art historical inquiry across the discipline. Intersections of form with content and changes in form and content are considered here mainly as they reflect the stated concerns of the Editors. Changes are illustrated and noted in the year entries of the timeline.

The online publishing platform used here, Scalar, allows further exploration of this information through links, much like a web site, and by tags, which, more than key words, allow the reader to strike alternate paths. You might, for example, decide to explore tags for editorial statements, or other tagged themes noted in timeline entries. Cost, for example, has always been a concern, so changes and events associated with cost (subventions, for example, and cost increases for subscriptions) have been tagged, as have illustrations and other aspects of format, and  content.  Moreover, tag visualization provides impressionistic and dynamic rendering of information. (For instruction in how to use Scalar’s navigation possibilities, see this video.) However you chart your own paths through this information you will sketch alternate histories of intellectual concerns and the more mundane restrictions that have mitigated the aspirations of the journal's Editors and readership.  Is Scalar, an example of an open source platform program for born-digital publishing, the kind of publishing option The Art Bulletin should consider taking advantage of in its digital future?

As the journal of record for the discipline in America, The Art Bulletin provides essential services for art historical scholarship across all fields (presenting a compendious view of ongoing research at the highest levels and emerging areas of common interest, as well as furnishing a venue for the peer-reviewed articles so essential to tenure and promotion in the academy) with the goal of sustaining the discipline.  How do you imagine the journal might exploit online opportunities while continuing to serve and support the discipline? No step into the future should be undertaken without concerted consideration by the readership of The Art Bulletin of past developments and current trends in the the history of art. We ask you to explore this site, imagine the possibilities, and let us know your thoughts.

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