Concerns About Open Cultural Data

The open cultural data movement has many positive and negative aspects. With available open cultural data, there is a plethora of educational benefits and research opportunities. However, open cultural data also presents a number of questions and concerns.

For instance, what happens when collections that include items that were never meant to be shown publicly, are culturally significant to a marginalized community or have been stolen from a community, make their collections and data freely available on the web?

Additionally, Open cultural data made available on the web can exacerbate negative effects that happen within a musuem setting. Narratives generated by museums rather than the culture from which the object/image came from can reach wider audiences on the internet.Despite licenses and copyrights, images often circulate on the web without any context and can be used for a variety of purposes, thus images can also be appropriated, decontextualized, and redefined by a wider audience on the web.

Furthermore, many open cultural platforms on the web, including wikiart, showcase objects and images, as well as define art, through western art historical ways of categorizing and defining art, which is problematic for many reasons and leaves many art forms and movements out of the conversation.

Ultimately there are many positive and negative potentials for Open Cultural Data.  Images and data can range from being completely appropriated, decontextualized, and redefined, or highly contextualized and democratized.

 

 

 

 

3 thoughts on “Concerns About Open Cultural Data”

  1. It’s interesting to think, too, about how the circulation of all this open data affects museums’ accustomed role as “treasure houses.” Does this threaten museums’ cultural primacy, or help to reinforce it?

  2. I think open cultural data definitely complicates matters of contextualization. We are a remix culture. We download, remix, reuse, and upload content that is not ours to begin with. But anything made available online is at our disposable, so it seems, and thus as millennial’s it appears that it is our inherent right to use this content as we see fit. Not only does contextualization get lost here, but I think this also further complicates the notion of authorship, which is problematic.

  3. I think that the questions and concerns that you address are extremely important. However, your questions also bring up a larger issue than just the dangers of open data. Rather, I feel that you are bringning the history of museums into question. This questioning, prompted by the debates surrounding open data, is crucial in the attempts that many communities are making to return their stolen items to their communities. It also seems to me that this debate over open data will work to support the efforts made by communities to return their stolen items because it brings this information to the forefront.

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