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How balanced is the content in Google Arts and Culture? My new paper with @InnaKizhner, a quantitative analysis of @googlearts, shows it is a site of digital cultural colonialism, with biases towards USA content. Read the @DSHjournal #openaccess PDF (1/n): https://melissaterras.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/kizhner_terras_digital_cultural_colonialism.pdf
But it’s not only biases regarding the USA. Only 7.5% of the content is from GLAM institutions beyond the USA, UK, Netherlands and Italy. There are very few African cultural institutions who have contributed to the platform, and there is very little African culture present.
Also! Artworks from capital cities dominate the collections, while art from provinces is underrepresented (we compared against state catalogues of Russia and France to look at this). There is a dominance of art from the 20th century, which is weird because copyright/permissions.
This leads to some strangeness. In 2019 (when we gathered data in DH class) the culture of Kazakhstan was represented entirely in GA&C by pictures of USA & Russian astronauts, from the NASA archives: no Kazakhstani institution uploaded content themselves. https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/kazakhstan/m047lj?hl=en
We therefore show that GA&C is a corpus where a number of cultures are underrepresented or marginalized. It maintains dominant cultural systems, including promoting the cultural holdings of the United States of America above all others.
GA&C is therefore an example of “digital cultural colonialism”, which amplifies the cultural holdings of one particular country, and also reinforces the conventional traditions of art collection and interpretation that dominate museum displays in larger Western cities.
The biases may have long-ranging affects: selecting what can be promoted, accessed, disseminated, and studied. This is the new digital canon: one that can be appropriated for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. The policies and choices should be documented & explained!
Aggregators of Digital Cultural Heritage are not neutral. What will @googlearts do to make its processes for showcasing ‘arts and culture’ transparent? How will it deploy resources to expand the reach and spread of the digital content it features? And ensure equality & diversity?
Lots more in the full paper over at @dshjournal “Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture” by @innkizhner, me et al: https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqaa055/6042086?login=true. Or in #OA on my blog: https://melissaterras.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/kizhner_terras_digital_cultural_colonialism.pdf
We’re following this up with a study on GLAM experiences of working with Google Arts and Culture, and would be delighted to know your opinion of the platform, its benefits, its drawbacks, & its effects on the cultural & heritage sector. Please do share! https://edinburgh.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/google-arts-and-culture-the-glam-sector-experience-survey
