Abstract
Large cultural heritage aggregators, such as Europeana and Google Arts and Culture (GA&C), collect metadata and
images from cultural institutions. They provide a single portal that introduces cultural heritage from around the world
to the public (Sood, 2016, Petras et al., 2017). Selecting images and artifacts for these aggregators is an outcome of
curatorial decisions, enlarging an art canon (Earhart, 2012, Feldman, 2016), building a cultural capital (Bertrand and
Kamenica, 2018), and providing an infrastructure for a corpus of art history images (Drucker, 2013) that is critically
important for the research in Digital Humanities. However, are such portals indeed a representative and balanced
collection, the foundation for objective humanistic study and judgement? In this paper we argue that diversity, although
present in GA&C, is too narrow to support our hope that it can act as a corpus of digital art history images. Our
evidence proves that the digital corpus amplifies biases within the arts world towards western culture.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Digital Humanities 2019, Utrecht |
Publisher | Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations |
Publication status | Published - 10 Jul 2019 |