Digital History and the Politics of Digitization

Abstract

Much has been made in recent years of the transformative potential of digital resources and historical data for historical research. Historians seem to be flooded with retro-digitized and born-digital materials and tend to take these for granted, grateful for the opportunities they afford. In a research environment that increasingly privileges what is available online, the questions of why, where, and how we can access what we can access, and how it affects historical research have become ever more urgent. This article proposes a framework through which to contextualize the politics of (digital) heritage preservation, and a model to analyse its most important political dimensions, drawing upon literature from the digital humanities and history as well as archival, library, and information science. The first part will outline the global dimensions of the politics of digital cultural heritage, focusing on developments between and within the Global North and South, framed within the broader context of the politics of heritage and its preservation. The second part surveys the history and current state of digitization and offers a structured analysis of the process of digitization and its political dimensions. Choices and decisions about selection for digitization, how to catalogue, classify, and what metadata to add are all political in nature and have political consequences, and the same is true for access. The article concludes with several recommendations and a plea to acknowledge the importance of digital cataloguing in enabling access to the global human record.

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

“…Our preliminary results based on the analysis of images from Russian and French collections show some emphasis on 'colonial culture' phenomenon and the representations of the "exotic other" that can match the expectations of the Western public. While the bias resulting from digitization of historical documents and literary datasets has been discussed in literature (Bode 2018;Zaagsma, 2019;Bode 2020), the magnitude of our results shows the importance of this issue for future digitization projects and aggregators of cultural content. We also find that the difference in the number of objects for different countries and institutions is related to data transparency, open access policies and having previously digitized content to facilitate data transfer.…”

“…6) creates the critical mass of concepts, attitudes and ideologies which, by means of their quantity, push out other cultures and ideologies from interaction. This means that the postmodernist 'plurality' of voices (Connor, 1991, p. 80 cited from Harrison, 1997 which could have been GA&C's intention (Sood, 2016) was enacted in a way that resulted in augmenting colonialism and strengthening prejudices and canons (Earheart, 2012, Zaagsma, 2019 embedded in the colonial institutions of the past. Postcolonial and postmodernist 'assumption of change' (Harrison, 1997, p. 41) was supposed to lead to a multicultural and multivocal collection of cultures, regions and periods in a digital world, greatly enlarging the information outreach via GA&C's platform.…”

“…Although these abundant quantities of images are available through a variety of channels, including digital libraries and aggregators of cultural heritage data (Sood, 2016;, we do not know if and how images in the aggregators represent various cultures, genres and geographic regions (Thylstrup, 2019). This means that if larger quantities of objects, images and stories related to a particular idea or representation of selected knowledge are present in large aggregators of cultural content, these ideas and concepts will be better accessed, disseminated and studied and they will become the foundation of the new digital canon (Earheart, 2012;Feldman, 2017;Thylstrup, 2019;Zaagsma, 2019).…”

All WARC and no playback: The materialities of data-centered web archives research

“…These findings begin to develop an approach for considering how the pre-configured data and metadata of digital sources can, should, and must be similarly examined with a critical eye, and not taken as given. Following work by Zaagsma (2022), analysis of the WARC here demonstrates the effects of specific design choices embedded in data structures, reflecting power relations and politics, which ultimately limit how data can be transformed, manipulated, or analyzed. Beyond web archives, similar material relationships should be examined for diverse fields of study and practical applications premised on capturing, storing and stabilizing digital data and traces from different networked and platform-specific sources including social media studies, computational social sciences, and open source intelligence.…”

“…For digital collections, Loukissas examines the rich and varied metadata of the Digital Public Library of America, “assembled from heterogeneous sources, each with their own local conditions” (Loukissas, 2019: 57). For digitized archival sources, Zaagsma considers how “the power relations and political visions embedded in analogue classifications,” are reproduced even when (re)classified for purposes of findability and maintaining a “workable order” (Zaagsma, 2022: 13). Additionally, work from science and technology studies explores the collection and construction of data artifacts as scientific evidence, considering how metadata and organizational contexts influence data's collection, flows and “frictions” (Edwards et al, 2011; Ribes and Jackson, 2013; Bates et al, 2016).…”