Observing semantic change in the representation of ethnic minorities through distant reading of museum catalogues

Computational analysis that demonstrates biased representations
related to ethnicities has been widely covered in literature
(see, for example, Garg et al. 2018, Tripodi et al. 2019, Lucy et
al. 2020). Previous research in computational approaches has revealed
diachronic change of concepts in general (Tahmasebi et al.
2018) and for the representation of antisemitism, in particular (Tripodi
et al. 2019). However, literature that shows how local representations
of ethnic minorities change through contexts revealed
in museum catalogues and metadata, how they are tagged, contextualised
and processed through museum databases, and consequently
what kind of knowledge is produced and/or retrieved, is
relatively scarce. In this paper we demonstrate how conceptual representations
related to Jews and Armenians fluctuate, depending
on where contexts related to these ethnic minorities are produced.
The aim of this paper is to show how the analysis of museum
catalogues and online museum collections can reveal the difference
over geographic areas in dominating attitudes and multiple
perspectives in the perception of minority cultures. We compare
search results related to Jews and Armenians for the British Museum
in London and the State Historical Museum in Moscow.
The museums were chosen as they both represent an ‘imperial archive’
(Barringer and Flynn 1998, p. 11, Khazanov 2000), they
have collections that include multiple historical objects and they
are both located in capital cities for the two countries.Their online
digital collections produce sufficient results to analyse the representation
of minorities and the perspectives of these two major
memory institutions on what is deemed an ethnic minority.