Abstract
The influence of computer science on disciplines outside of itself has constituted hybrid communities of practice, such as the digital humanities (DH) and digital art history (DAH), the latter being an offspring of the former.[1] The questions asked within these interdisciplinary fields are substantially different from those in core computer science fields, such as systems theory, language theory, and theory of computation.[2] As a result of the interdisciplinary nature of their inquiries, research questions pertaining to DH and the ethical challenges that accompany them are diametrically opposed to the empirical and often unambiguous measures of validity to which computer scientists are accustomed. This article will explore ethical questions pertaining to collections aggregation systems from the perspective of postcolonial scholarship and seek paths towards addressing the ethical questions currently facing many DH projects. To do so, I will use the Getty Research Portal (hereafter, “the Portal”) as a case study of a digital repository and draw on my personal experience as a software developer working on the project, as well as on current research on biases and ethics within DH.
Highlights
The influence of computer science on disciplines outside of itself has constituted hybrid communities of practice, such as the digital humanities (DH) and digital art history (DAH), the latter being an offspring of the former.[1]
The project aims to provide an online platform functioning as a centralized aggregator and search engine for digitized art history texts and claims no geographical limits, being described by the Getty Research Institute as “a global resource for the history of art of all cultures.”[8]. Through my work on this project, I came to witness firsthand the methodological dominance of the EuroAmerican DH community and how its hegemony in the field sets the standards for the rest of the world, while at the same time being at the forefront of efforts to remedy such biases
The Portal project was developed with a dependency on standardized classification systems such as Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and Dublin Core (DC), as it requires communication and resource sharing between different institutions
Summary
The influence of computer science on disciplines outside of itself has constituted hybrid communities of practice, such as the digital humanities (DH) and digital art history (DAH), the latter being an offspring of the former.[1]. The project aims to provide an online platform functioning as a centralized aggregator and search engine for digitized art history texts and claims no geographical limits, being described by the Getty Research Institute as “a global resource for the history of art of all cultures.”[8] Through my work on this project, I came to witness firsthand the methodological dominance of the EuroAmerican DH community and how its hegemony in the field sets the standards for the rest of the world, while at the same time being at the forefront of efforts to remedy such biases This situation currently pushes peripheral cultures towards invisibility and favors a monopoly on the ways in which knowledge is understood and disseminated, due to the cultural, political, and linguistic bias of its digital standards, protocols, and interfaces.[9] This paper aims to investigate this ongoing struggle by uncovering biases inherent in the Portal through a categorical system developed by Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum, and to identify the latent possibility of a different ethical framework.[10]
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