What do they make us see: a comparative study of cultural bias in online databases of two large museums
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2022-0047 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Pages | 320-340 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet,Inna Kizhner,Sara Minster |
What do they make us see:
a comparative study of cultural
bias in online databases of two
large museums
Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet
Department of Information Science, Faculty of Humanities, Bar-Ilan University,
Ramat Gan, Israel
Inna Kizhner
Siberian Federal University, Krasnoarsk, Russian Federation, and
Sara Minster
Department of Information Science, Faculty of Humanities, Bar-Ilan University,
Ramat Gan, Israel
Abstract
Purpose –Large cultural heritage datasets from museum collections tend to be biased and demonstrate
omissions that result from a series of decisions at various stages of the collection construction. The purpose of
this study is to applya set of ethical criteria to compare the level of bias of six online databases produced by two
major art museums, identifying the most biased and the least biased databases.
Design/methodology/approach –At the first stage, the relevant data have been automatically extracted
from all six databases and mapped to a unified ontological scheme based on Wikidata. Then, the authors
applied ethical criteria to the results of the geographical distribution of records provided by two major art
museums as online databases accessed via museums’websites, API datasets and datasets submitted to
Wikidata.
Findings–The authors show that the museums use different artworks in each of its online databases and each
data-base has different types of bias reflected by the study variables, such as artworks’country of origin or the
creator’s nationality. For most variables, the database behind the online search system on the museum’s
website is more balanced and ethical than the API dataset and Wikidata databases of the two museums.
Originality/value –By applying ethical criteria to the analysis of culturalbias in various museum databases
aimed at different audiences including end users, researchers and commercial institutions, this paper shows the
importance of explicating bias and maintaining integrity in cultural heritage representation through different
channels that potentially have high impact on how culture is perceived, disseminated, contextualized and
transformed.
Keywords Ethics, Bias, Museums, Assessment, Online databases, Wikidata
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
A culture represents to its participants a coherent world picture in which they find their
present status and past experiences; it is also a system of self-reflections in which the
participants may become critically aware of the way in which they are represented (Brett,
1994). Museums are the largest source of cultural collections which enable the general public
to be exposed to artworks they would not otherwise be able to reach. Hence, the effectiveness
of representation in museums is parti cularly important for the cultures that were
fundamentally different from what was known and familiar to Europe and North America
in the 19th century when many museums were established. However, trying to accommodate
other cultures, Western museums resorted to a variety of methods ranging from total
disregard and not exhibiting artworks in meaningful displays, to finding isolated, specific
JD
79,2
320
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 20 February 2022
Revised 7 June 2022
Accepted 9 June 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 2, 2023
pp. 320-340
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2022-0047
solutions used sporadically, which did not convey cultural experience to viewers, and
certainly did not do justice to colonial cultural heritage or cultural objects from remote places
(Peers and Brown, 2003;Lynch and Alberti, 2010).
The transition of museums to the digitization of cultural collections has given rise to new
opportunities for presenting more balanced and inclusive information. Users can access
information on the museum’s website and search for artworks, using free-text queries. It has
also opened opportunities for researchers and commercial institutions to work under open
access policies. Following these policies, museums allow users direct access to the database of
metadata records of artworks in the museum collections for dissemination and reuse.
However, the databases that are accessible to the public do not contain all the items existing
in the institution, and the decision regarding which artworks and metadata properties will be
accessible or how data are going to be cataloged are subjective and made by different people
at different points in time (Mak, 2014;Borgman et al., 2019;Bode, 2020;Maemura, 2021;
Kizhner et al., forthcoming).
The purpose of this study is to examine what characterizes the information that museums
choose to display to the public on the Internet. To this end, the theoretical framework adopted
in this study is the ethical approach to information organization and representation
(Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Hajibayova, 2020). The framework offers five principles for ethical
evaluation of information repositories, based on expressing the voices, cultures and
perspectives of users from diverse population groups. In other words, if a museum’s database
presents a diverse variety of artworks and creators from different countries and cultures, we
can say that it meets the ethical requirement to make different cultures visible and accessible,
and cares for the information needs of different users.
In order to assess the compliance with the requirements of the ethical model for the
organization and presentation of information in museum databases, this paper proposes a
generic research methodology that can be applied to various open online cultural databases.
To examine the applicability and effectiveness of the methodology, two central museums,
representative of Western culture, were selected: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the
United States and the Rijksmuseum in Europe. Each of these museums has a number of
online databases that contain a subset of metadata items, whereas each database is designed
for different target audiences and purposes. The first is the museum’s API dataset, which can
be accessed via an API or downloaded to a personal computer, enabling users to search and
analyze the information in the database directly. This type of database is mainly intended for
commercial and academic parties that can study and research the information in it or use it to
improve computational models (Tallon, 2018;Van Zuijlen et al., 2021;Villaespesa and Crider,
2021). A second type of database is accessible to end users through the museum’s online
search system, i.e. through search engine queries. This database is mainly aimed at private
users from diverse cultural backgrounds (Villaespesa, 2019) who focus on website aesthetics,
search options and content manipulation (Lopatovska, 2015). The third type of database that
was examined is the collection of digital objects uploaded by the museum to the Wikidata
knowledge graph established by the Wikimedia foundation. Wikidata is a structured
knowledge graph that “represents objects through their attributes and relationships to other
objects”(Shaik et al., 2021). For eight years now, Wikidata –the largest open ontology in the
world –has been making cultural heritage accessible to the general public, with the help of the
GLAM-Wiki project. As part of this project, metadata records are transferred from various
sources, and entered into Wikidata in a format adapted to cultural heritage, that was built in
cooperation with the GLAM community. The GLAM community relies on Wikidata’s
multidisciplinary capabilities, such as the fact that Wikidata is multilingual, the information
can be displayed to each user in their preferred language, and it can be connected to
additional semantic databases available online. Wikidata is accessed through SPARQL [1]
queries and used primarily by researchers. These three types of museums’databases were
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