Collection Data in the Cultural Gap. The Dissemination of Knowledge in a Precarious State at the Intersection of Museums, Art History and the Digital Humanities
The culture of museums differs from the culture at universities in terms of their missions and interests in dealing with collection data. While museums manage the collections in databases, provide online access to the artifacts or offer mediation applications, academics focus on the content-related, research-based examination of collection data. Scholars in art history and digital humanities increasingly participate in a digital knowledge culture in which viewing images of artworks from a database and reading accompanying information on a public interface proves unsatisfactory. Times have changed and data itself has become a desired research subject. When museums, art history, and the digital humanities increasingly recognize each other’s different cultures and how they are affected by the digital transformation, this prepares the ground for a sustainable exchange of knowledge in the digital realm as well. Currently, the cultural knowledge that could emerge from insights gained through the analysis of digital images and metadata from art collections is at risk of being stuck unreachable in databases. This paper explores the conditions under which knowledge is constituted based on digital technology by providing a comprehensive overview of the most up-to-date developments in the field of museums and in digital art history. Part of the theoretical argument is to identify what the stumbling blocks to an efficient, promising, and future-oriented use of collection data are, but also to critically address limitations of technology-driven art historical research
