Ethnic minorities in online museum collections: skews and bias in digital material culture

Abstract As gateways into accessing the past, and catalogues of the cultures—and their biases—that we inherit, there are various research possibilities and limitations when considering library and museum online collections as sources of data. This study analyses different perspectives on how Jewish and Armenian ethnic minorities are represented by digital online collections of major historical museums. We document that the representation of concepts is skewed due to acquisition practices, augmented by the socio-technical infrastructures of the two museums under study. We show skews in the representation determined by major object groups (e.g. several thousand objects of the same type from a single archaeological expedition). Finally, we demonstrate that analysis of semi-structured data of museum catalogues presents major processing difficulties due to the multiple meanings of the same concept. We argue that the analysis of museum catalogues should include the knowledge of socio-technical contexts of data creation, such as metadata and lengthier structures, such as paradata or historical interpretation, which may add depth and meaning to subsequent analysis.