Accessing Russian culture online: The scope of digitization in museums across Russia

Kizhner, Inna; Terras, Melissa; Rumyantsev, Maxim; Sycheva, Kristina; Rudov, Ivan

doi:10.1093/llc/fqy035

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Lower representation in these cases can be related to policies of open access and lack of emphasis on online dissemination of museum images: in the case of Russia, museum data dissemination and reuse for non-inventory purposes are not a priority (Kizhner et al, 2019). We cannot generalize these results to all countries from the UN list as we do not know the rates and scope of digitization in these countries and whether low levels of digitization can be an obstacle to sending images to international aggregators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…To that end, we chose two countries for sampling and further analysis: Russia and France, selected because both countries have an impressive number of museums and museum objects -ca. 2,300 museums, 80 million museum objects for Russia (Kizhner et al, 2019) and 1 This enables us to find out how representative GA&C is in terms of geographical distribution or distribution across time and genres. We used a qualitative methodology to study the principles of GA&C's content selection.…”

Section: Data Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Building a corpus of artworks that include a proportion of objects from a variety of cultures, offering non-colonial social constructs and perspectives, can enlarge the art history canon, and enable further analysis via Digital Humanities techniques (Earhart, 2012;Feldman, 2017, Kizhner et al, 2019. Since the initial museological literature of the 1990s 1 on the reduction of the colonized world presented in museums, an approach that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Boast, 2011, p. 64), numerous studies have emphasized the difficulties of having a multicultural or non-unitary experience in a museum (Ashley, 2005;Knell et al, 2010;Boast, 2011;Polm, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kizhner

Terras

Rumyantsev

et al. 2020

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Data Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kizhner

Terras

Rumyantsev

et al. 2020

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Museums may exploit their presence in the digital environment to enhance the stakeholders' access to information about their activities, which is key to establish durable and trustful exchanges with stakeholders (Hughes, 2004). The digital transition expands the access to the cultural heritage beyond the physical boundaries of the organization (Ongena et al, 2013), permitting virtual visitors to experience the cultural service offering through online tours and exhibitions (Bertacchini & Morando, 2013; Kizhner et al, 2019). Synthesizing these points, it is assumed that:Hypothesis Digitization augments the physical visitors' service experience . Hypothesis Digitization opens the access of the cultural heritage to virtual visitors .…”

Section: Conceptual Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing museums' attractiveness through digitization: An investigation of Italian medium and large‐sized museums and cultural institutions

Palumbo

2021

Journal of Tourism Research

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The Covid-19 pandemic put the museums' viability under stress, with national and supranational policies imposing closures and restricting the number of admitted visitors. Digitization enables cultural institutions to overcome such constraints, prompting innovative service delivery models. However, evidence on digitization's implications on organizational attractiveness (OA) is scant. Taking a retrospective approach, the article proposes a parallel mediation analysis to shed some light on the effects of digitization on museums' attractiveness. Findings suggest that digitization enhances OA directly and indirectly, via the delivery of digital services to physical visitors. Furthermore, digitization allows museums to meet the virtual visitors' expectations, enriching the cultural service offering.

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“…debating the advantages of creating and making accessible digitized Russian visual material in collections and archives in-and outside of Russia (see Kizhner et al 2018;Bridgers and Blood 2010;Kain 2018). For example, Biryukova et al (2017) discuss how virtual cultural storages and virtual museums can be used to preserve the Russian cultural heritage.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History

Kangas

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

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With the growing interest in digital humanities, the methodology of digital art history is in some respects lagging behind the trend. Given the prospects of the new digital image analysis, computer vision, and visualization methods, a number of questions have arisen as to how exactly the new digital methods can and should be applied to art history. Furthermore, when trying to apply these digital methods to the analysis of Russian art, one encounters a whole new set of questions and challenges. In this chapter, I examine current and potential applications of digital methods to the analysis of Soviet political cartoons published in Pravda during the “Great Patriotic War,” 1941–1945, as well as the study of Russian art history more generally. I especially examine how the combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of political cartoons enables a deeper understanding that illustrates cultural, historical, and political developments over time.

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Accessing Russian culture online: The scope of digitization in museums across Russia

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

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

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

Enhancing museums' attractiveness through digitization: An investigation of Italian medium and large‐sized museums and cultural institutions

The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History

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