Perspectives on
Data

This introduction to the publication surveys recent critical approaches to data production and analysis in art, art history, museums, and visual studies, and identifies among the contributions a shared conviction that people—and data’s impact on them—must remain at the center of these investigations.

An analysis of the Adler Planetarium’s Tag Along with Adler project, which invited members of the public to tag items from this science museum’s holdings, that demonstrates how crowdsourcing metadata can increase the findability of museum collections.

This discussion of the ideas underlying Mapping Senufo—a collaborative, born-digital publication focused on a group of so-called traditional African arts—explores the mismatch between many standard categories of museum collection management systems and African art, and identifies means to remedy this problem.

An investigation of how data visualizations such as maps and charts can expose Eurocentrism in art history and museums, focusing primarily on how such biases manifest in the architecture surveys often used in introductory college courses.

A demonstration, informed by feminist theory, of how embracing linked open data (LOD) will enable museums and other cultural institutions to increase the visibility of collection items that do not fit neatly in standard categories, taking the artists’ books of Carolee Schneemann as an example.

An account of the limitations of museums’ current approaches to presenting provenance data digitally that advocates for adopting a linked open data (LOD) approach.

An analysis of the work of Fabio Lattanzi Antinori and Nathalie Miebach, who each use data as both medium and tool to challenge the separation of art and science and the devaluation of senses other than sight in both those realms.

A video that considers oil production and climate change, accompanied by a personal essay in which the artist, a Gulf Coast native, reflects on these issues.