Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture

Abstract

In February 2011, Google launched its Google Art Project, now known as Google Arts and Culture (GA&C), that currently hosts approximately six million high-resolution images of artworks from around the world, with an objective to make culture more accessible. We demonstrate that GA&C has experienced dramatic growth in recent years and includes artworks for almost every country from the UN member list. However, we document a noticeable lack of balance in the aggregator, with some countries and institutions being prioritized, and a major proportion of the holdings featuring content that resides in the USA. Moreover, after examining Russian and French collections, we see the dominance of artworks from their capital cities in GA&C, while art from provinces is clearly underrepresented. Finally, we find a dominance of art from the 20th century with some emphasis on artworks demonstrating a break in canon or ‘otherness’ of non-Western countries. The discrepancies that we observe give evidence to support previously posited ideas of digital cultural colonialism. This may be due to a lack of data transparency or availability of previously digitized content in the countries with a lower representation in the portal, or an unintentional digital amplification of conventional traditions of art collection and interpretation that dominate museum displays in larger Western cities. We call for explicit statement by platforms on their collection and selection criteria and the need for researchers to understand the biases emerging from aggregated digitized content.

Teaching controversial socio-scientific issues in online exhibits of science museums: Covid-19 on the scene

“…Although Google Arts & Culture platform maps almost all science museums and is a reference for museums of all areas of knowledge, especially in view of the growth of online exhibits, the contribution of STEM institutions to promoting virtual visits is still barely observable on it. Such a fact has opened a range of reflections on the underfunding of science museums for the maintenance of online communications (Kemp, 2021 ), platforms’ biases behind the digitalization of art and culture (Kizhner et al, 2021 ), absence of socio-scientific controversy in the collections of those institutions (Colombo Junior & Marandino, 2020 ), and a view of science that minimizes its sociocultural dimension (Davies et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Other limitations regarding the low publication rate of Covid-19 exhibitions by STEM institutions on the analyzed platform may be related to the posting of subjects to Google approval, the need for the exhibition belonging to an organization with its own institutional website and email address, and the exhibit preset formats of slideshows (Google Arts & Culture Platform Help, 2022). Specific analyses on the platform's advantages and disadvantages incorporate the current literature in the field (Proctor, 2011;Cowin, 2020;Kizhner et al, 2020;Verde & Valero, 2021).…”

Communicating Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Visualization Research

“…In the first case (use-1), the authors used standard descriptive visualizations in their publication to communicate their findings. For instance, to give an overview of the distribution of Google's art and culture digitized material, media scholars presented maps, time series and pie charts [74].…”

What do they make us see: a comparative study of cultural bias in online databases of two large museums

“…Users' expectations to see a variety of contexts are sustained by the quality of museum information, a diversity of art objects selected for the first pages of the user interface, and by the abovementioned missions of the two museums aimed at multi-cultural representation. However, the composition and distribution of museum collections as well as silences and omissions in the collections' data, may create cultural bias (Bode, 2020;Kizhner et al, 2021;Ortolja-Baird and Nyhan, 2021;Boyd-Davis et al, 2021).…”