Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers, information specialists, curators, and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation, while undeniably important, has often meant that there is little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history. This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by approaching the use of digital technology in art history from a theoretical perspective and critically assessing specific case study examples. This book also considers the political dimensions associated with the large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management. A long-standing concern of the field—and also a major focal point of this book—is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field, there are some important shifts and changes too. One of the key changes is the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and an increased attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital tools within museums and collection management.

This study focuses the theoretical underpinning of the so-called semantic gap. By analysing the discourses on ideals and practices of image search and image use in terms of different understandings of ‘information’ and ‘communication’ this study illuminates the epistemological foundation of different ways of thinking about image descriptions. More precisely, it compares the discourse for metadata production, standards and information management with the discourse among humanities scholars. Close readings of handbooks, best practice and interviews with metadata producers discloses a discourse imbued by a mechanical model for communication and information transmission and a focus on objectivity and effectiveness. Simultaneously, interviews with humanities scholars and close readings of recent archival theory reveal another understanding of metadata as historically, institutionally, and even individually situated interpretations. As this study shows, attentiveness to the theoretical underpinning of the different ideals, wants and needs of metadata for images may illuminate why these differences exists.

4Picturing Platformization:Information Infrastructures in PictureArchives OnlineAnna NäslundThe discourses on platformization – meaning ‘the re-organisation of cultural prac-tices and imaginations around platforms’ (Poell et al. 2019) – in relation to picturearchives are very diverse. The same holds for the connected and partly overlappingconcept of datafication (Hansson et al. 2022), meaning in this context the trans-formation of picture collections into quantifiable data can be tracked, monitored,and analysed computationally. At one extreme, the process has been described asgiving unprecedented access to the visual heritage (see e.g. ‘Europeana Pro’ n.d.;Poll 2010); at the other, it has been argued that it can de-contextualize and banalizephotographs (see e.g. Birkin 2020; Capurro and Plets 2020). Whether one positionsoneself at either extreme or somewhere in between, it is certain that the transitionfrom analogue binders, boxes, and shelves to online platforms changes the waypicture archives work. In this context, the dyad concepts of digitization and digi-talization are relevant. Typically, the term ‘digitization’ has been used to refer to‘the purely technical aspects’ of the transformation of analogue to digital, while theterm ‘digitalization’ instead refers to the ‘manifold sociotechnical phenomena andprocesses of adopting and using these technologies in broader context’ (Frenzel et al.2021). Even though the technological process and application are inseparablefrom the cultural, social, and institutional context where it is developed and used,and the separation of technical and the social or cultural is impossible, I will usethe term ‘digitization’ in the following when referring to the act of transforminganalogue pictures to digital representations. And I use the term ‘digitalization’when talking about the more general effects and implications of these processes.

This chapter presents a study of how metadata shapes the conditions of cultural heritage representation, focusing on Sami images in the online archive of the Swedish National Heritage Board. Datasets from the in-house database Kulturmiljöbild and the social media platform Flickr Commons are gathered and interpreted using cross-disciplinary methods within a framework of critical data studies where participation and performativity are key. The study uncovers how different metadata structures and practices facilitate different narratives that both hide and highlight Sami markers. Four workaround strategies in relation to diversity are identified, i.e., means to resolve or bypass limitations to the spectrum of perspectives expressed in image descriptions: omission, abstraction, translation, and hyperbole. This typology demonstrates how metadata affects diversity by governing image searches online textually and visually, thus contributing important insights into the rhetorical dynamic between interface and infrastructure in archives where dominant narratives are limiting commitments to diversity.

In an era of big data and fake news, museums' collection practices are particularly important democratic cornerstones. Participatory technologies such as crowdsourcing or wikis have been put forward as a means to make museum collections more open and searchable, motivated by a desire for efficiency but also as a way to engage the public in the development of a more diverse and polyphonic heritage. However, there is a lack of a nuanced vocabulary to describe participatory technologies in terms of democracy. Without a deeper understanding of how technology shapes the overall structures, there is a risk that the tools instead undermine democratic ambitions.

Addressing the need to conceptualize democracy in these contexts, we therefore develop a framework for participatory technologies with an eye toward the long-term development and preservation of cultural heritage. In this framework different democratic processes intersect with democratic values, from a liberal conception of democracy to a more deliberative democracy, to an agonistic pluralism emphasizing the importance of acknowledging conflict and diversity.

To firmly ground our vocabulary in museum collection practices, we have investigated two cases from museums in the US that have opposite participatory strategies for enriching images with metadata; the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and the National Gallery of Art collection on Wikimedia Commons. These cases demonstrate how the framework can be used to identify patterns of participation showing the support for different values and processes.

Furthermore, our conceptual investigation points out a contradiction in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, between the pluralism and conflicts emphasized in more critical and participatory design perspectives used in the development of design, and the features in the actual design of participatory technologies, emphasizing consistency and access.

This study of crowdsourcing practices at Kbhbilleder.dk at the Copenhagen City Archives provides a rich description of how motivation and work relations are situated in a wider infrastructure of different tools and social settings. Approximately, 94% of the work is here done by 7 of the 2,433 participants. The article contributes insights into how these super-taggers carry out their work, describing and placing images on a map, through an extensive discursive effort that takes place outside the institution’s more limited interface in private discussion forums with over 60 000 participants. The more exploratory qualitative work that is going on in different discussion groups does not fit within the archive’s technical framework. Instead, alternative archives are growing within privately owned networks, where participants’ own collections merge with images from public archives. Rather than focusing on the nature of participants’ motivation, the article suggests a relational perspective on participation that is useful for analyzing a systems’ support for participation. Pointing out how people’s motivation in citizen science correspond with relational and intra-relational aspects enables an approach to system design that potentially supports or counteracts these aspects.

The increasing digitiza-ti on and the emergence of new data-sharing practices change our understanding of how cultural heritage is de -fined, collected, and exhibited. We must pay particular attention to the ways in which digital interfaces curate history. Crowdsourcing, social media, linked open data, and other open science practices challenge the current practices of cul-tural heritage institutions, owing to the established structures between and within them and the char-acter of the networked publics involved. Howev-er, such challenges also open new opportunities for wider negotiations of cultural heritage and rethinking what cultural heritage institutions and practices are. This spe-cial issue brings together scholars from different disciplines to provide critically and empirically grounded perspectives on the datafication of cul-tural heritage institutions' exhibition and collection practices.