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

Open access
Kizhner, Inna, Terras, Melissa, Rumyantsev, Maxim, Khokhlova, Valentina, Demeshkova, Elisaveta, Rudov, Ivan, Afanasieva, Julia·2021·Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DOI 10.1093/llc/fqaa055
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Abstract

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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108 of 108 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • Existing scholarship on Google Arts & Culture has tended to analyze it through snapshots at particular moments in time, focusing on its interface, narratives, or partnerships as they appear in a given iteration.

    “Existing scholarship on the platform has tended to analyze it through snapshots at particular moments in time, focusing on its interface, narratives, or partnerships as they appear in a given iteration (Kizhner et al., 2021; Pesce et al., 2019; Rodr´ ı guez-Ortega, 2018; Valt´ ysson, 2020; Wilson-Barnao, 2017).”

    From Google Arts & Culture and the platformization of cultural heritage: Convergence, gamification, and shifting positions of institutional partners (2026) · cites this paper as Kizhner et al., 2021

Cites

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6 of the 114 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 10

  1. Ashley, 2005, Hybrid Entities, Annual Graduate Conference Hosted by the York/Ryerson Programme in Communication and Culture, 31
  2. Egbert, 2019, Multidimensional Analysis. Research Methods and Current Issues, 27
  3. Forsyth, 1992, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's Asian Colony 1581–1990
  4. Gasparov, 1995, A History of the 20th Century Russian Poetry: Style and Language of Several Russian Poets
  5. Imbert, 2020, Transfert(s): Western fashion meets the East, Google Arts and Culture
  6. Said, 1978, Orientalism
  7. Suslov, 2007, Region: Economics and Sociology
  8. Van Riel, 2017, Why People Love Art Museums: A Reputation Study about the 18 Most Famous Museums among Visitors in 10 Countries
  9. Yankova, 2015, The European digital library-factor for long-life learning in arts and cultural studies, Qualitative & Quantitative Methods in Libraries, 4, 965
  10. Yi, 2020, Intelligent Human Systems Integration 2020. IHSI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

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Authors
Kizhner, I., Terras, M., Rumyantsev, M., Khokhlova, V., Demeshkova, E., Rudov, I., & Afanasieva, J.
Affiliations
  • Siberian Federal University (RU)
  • University of Edinburgh (GB)
Corresponding author
Kizhner, Inna
ORCID
Venue
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2020-12-19
Volume
36
Issue
3
Pages
607-640
ISSN
  • 2055-7671 (ISSN-L)
  • 2055-768X
DOI
10.1093/llc/fqaa055
OpenAlex
W3114567463
Semantic Scholar
22645f7c293c92694068da452af1bc9073084288
Cited by
72
References
114
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 4
FWCI
61.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (publishedVersion)
  • Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Museology › Libraries and Information Services
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Conservation › Digital and Traditional Archives Management
Keywords
representation bias, cultural representation, museum collections, 20th-century art, non-Western art, data transparency

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