The design and use of metadata are always culturally and ideologically inflicted. Accordingly, the practice and policy of tagging images in cultural heritage institutions are not only fundamental for our understanding of the past but vital in navigating the present. Especially when it comes to big data and data-driven research, we have to pay particular attention to the consequences of the interfaces that curate our common history. We are living in a metadata culture, where tagging data has become an important literacy. Metadata and the archiving practices that produce it are increasingly important for cultural heritage institutions, and for contemporary culture at large, as a mean to navigate the rapidly growing volume of data situating them historically, socially and, not least, locally.
Crowdsourcing, social media platforms for community engagement, linked open data, and other participatory and open science practices, create new challenges to for archiving institutions due to the character of the networked publics involved and the established structures between and within institutions, but also new opportunities and practices when it comes to understanding and defining our shared culture.
Research projects
The Politics of Metadata (2019-2023)
The aim of this five-year project funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant no 2018-01068) was to critically examine the policies and practices of tagging images in cultural heritage institutions’ image collections online through a cross-disciplinary approach, to contribute to the development of sustainable image-archiving eco-systems which simultaneously meet the demands of high usability, professionalism, and diversity and participation.
Sharing the Visual Heritage. Metadata, reuse and interdisciplinary research (2019-2023)
The purpose of this five-year project funded by the Swedish Research Council ( grant no 2018-06057) was to support the production of elaborated metadata for our visual heritage and to strengthen open and interdisciplinary research infrastructures within academia and between academia and the cultural heritage sector. The aim was first to investigate and develop methods for obtaining qualified and extensive metadata for images in digitalized cultural heritage collections. Second the project set out to outline participatory methodologies for open and linked metadata practices in an interdisciplinary research community.