The sale of heritage on eBay: Market trends and cultural value

Abstract

The marketisation of heritage has been a major topic of interest among heritage specialists studying how the online marketplace shapes sales. Missing from that debate is a large-scale analysis seeking to understand market trends on popular selling platforms such as eBay. Sites such as eBay can inform what heritage items are of interest to the wider public, and thus what is potentially of greater cultural value, while also demonstrating monetary value trends. To better understand the sale of heritage on eBay’s international site, this work applies named entity recognition using conditional random fields, a method within natural language processing, and word dictionaries that inform on market trends. The methods demonstrate how Western markets, particularly the US and UK, have dominated sales for different cultures. Roman, Egyptian, Viking (Norse/Dane) and Near East objects are sold the most. Surprisingly, Cyprus and Egypt, two countries with relatively strict prohibition against the sale of heritage items, make the top 10 selling countries on eBay. Objects such as jewellery, statues and figurines, and religious items sell in relatively greater numbers, while masks and vessels (e.g. vases) sell at generally higher prices. Metal, stone and terracotta are commonly sold materials. More rare materials, such as those made of ivory, papyrus or wood, have relatively higher prices. Few sellers dominate the market, where in some months 40% of sales are controlled by the top 10 sellers. The tool used for the study is freely provided, demonstrating benefits in an automated approach to understanding sale trends.

Heritage transformations

“…Such hindrances have resulted in a general tendency to either abstain from or outsource the technicity of digital heritage research, even though data-intensive methods informed by bigger data may open rich opportunities to advance thinking and provide new answers to old questions. Altaweel and Hadjitofi's (2020) study assesses cultural value by investigating the sales of antiquities on eBay via Natural Language Processing. The authors find that Western markets dominate sales, and – I would add – that some of the popularity ‘triggers’ previously detected for mass media portrayals of ancient material culture are also active in Big Data ecologies.…”

The Legality and Ethics of Web Scraping in Archaeology

“…Nonetheless, eBay, in particular, is one of the sites that has seen the most research on cultural heritage and antiquities markets through web scraping, and there are publicly available tools specifically designed to scrape the online auction house. This has helped us to gain compelling insights about what kinds of antiquities are most popular on the site and, as a result, to better understand the role the antiquities market plays in looting and the preservation of the archaeological record (Altaweel 2019;Altaweel and Hadjitofi 2020).…”

Heritage and Nationalism

“…Social researchers have tried to understand whether -and how -the availability of this material of unprecedented kind is, in actual fact, changing the questions that they ask, the methods, technical apparata and practices they adopt, not to mention the knowledge they produce and the ways in which they communicate it (Kitchin 2014b;Leonelli 2014;Schroeder 2014a;Felt 2016;Youtie, Porter and Huang 2017;Lipworth et al 2017;Lauro et al 2017). This level of critical scrutiny into the methodologies, epistemologies and ethics of research informed by big data is unparalleled in the humanities (Eijnatten, Pieters and Verheul 2013;Schoch 2013;Schroeder 2014a;Schäfer and Van Es 2017;Schiuma and Carlucci 2018), and the specific contribution of heritage scholars to discuss the topic has been especially limited (Bonacchi, Altaweel and Krzyzanska 2018;Richardson 2018;Bonacchi and Krzyzanska 2019;Altaweel and Hadjitofi 2020;Bonacchi 2021a;Bonacchi 2021b;Bonacchi and Krzyzanska 2021;Marwick and Smith 2021). The next chapter is dedicated to addressing these omissions.…”