Rhiannon Bettivia is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the politics and discourses of the growing sub-field of digital preservation and investigates new methodologies for preserving the interpretive framework for digital materials. She has published in the
Elizabeth Stainforth is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, UK. Her research investigates digital heritage cultures and the contemporary significance of memory for cultural heritage in the wake of digital technologies. She has published in the journals
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Digital technologies offer opportunities for engagement with cultural heritage
resources through the development of online platforms and databases. However,
questions have been raised about whether this type of engagement is structurally
open or bounded by pre-existing institutional frameworks. Michel Foucault’s
later work on governmentality
speaks to this concern and identifies in
modes of government the mutually reinforcing relation of all and each, to develop those elements
constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development
also fosters that of the strength of the state
Considering how digital technologies are mediating and structuring the relationships between individuals and organizations by way of a case study of the Europeana project
The logic of participation and shared ownership, frequently glossed as the
democratization of knowledge, belies much of the public discourse around digital
heritage web technologies (see, e.g.,
Michel Foucault’s later work on governmentality
speaks to these concerns
and also challenges the personal-institutional dichotomy they presuppose. He
identifies in modes of government the mutually reinforcing relation of all and
each, which seeks to develop those elements
constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development
also fosters that of the strength of the state
Europeana is a database and website that offers access to digitized items from over 2500 of Europe’s museums, libraries and archives. Funded by the European Commission (EC), the European Union’s (EU) executive body, Europeana demonstrates the move of all and each very clearly in its aim to promote a distinctly European space online for heterogeneous cultural objects and experiences. It is precisely the involvement of individual users and organizations that furthers this aim; the former group search for and submit content to it, while the latter are the primary donors of cultural heritage metadata. The parameters for user participation are subsequently defined according to these operations, which potentially limits the nature of audiences’ relationships with it.
Our interest here is in the way audience-organization relations are represented and delimited by technology. In this case study, we examine how such relations present themselves within the socio-technical network of Europeana, and how audience conceptions operate as techniques of government on the part of the EC. We discuss the interplay between the EC’s cultural policies and the techniques enacted through Europeana and show how the dynamic of all and each is manifested at different levels of the project. Digital platforms like Europeana, because of their scale, their partial (at best) success/adoption, and their nebulous geographic location are an interesting site for further exploration of these issues.
Our argument proceeds via an investigation of several technical elements of the
project, particularly the European Data Model (EDM) for aggregation and the
application program interface (API). A conglomerate of existing metadata
standards, the EDM was designed to facilitate the aggregation of digital
cultural heritage objects (CHOs) for the construction of the public memory
portal found at europeana.eu. The technical premise of Europeana, and its data
model, entail interoperability, which have political implications when
considered in light of the EC’s drive for greater social and political cohesion
in Europe. However, the political dimensions of interoperability are seldom, if
ever, owned by developers. The article concludes that a lack of explicit
definitions about audiences, what Europeana is, and how its various parts work
in concert constitute a
In the 1979 lecture,
Political Reason,
right from the start, the state is both individualizing and totalitarian […] Its inevitable effects are both individualization and totalization. Liberation can only come from attacking, not just one of these two effects, but political rationality’s very roots
What government has to do with is not territory but, rather, a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things, in this sense, with which government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those things.
These relational networks are composed of humans and things, both technological
and analog. In fact, in speaking about entities like the EU, the EC or
Europeana, we are employing simplistic terms to denote incredibly complex
networks of persons and technologies, as well as technological representations
of analog things
Furthermore, we suggest that the dynamic of all and each is particularly relevant
to this context and offers a method of investigating, more closely, the
negotiation of audience relationships and the individual-institution dichotomy.
As Chiara de Cesari notes, heritage scholars have been too focused on the
centralization, homogenization and cultural imperialism of heritage regimes and
insufficiently attentive to the capacities of decentralized groups, e.g. local
communities, or historically marginalized peoples Government, in short, “is a congenitally failing operation;” unanticipated
outcomes emerge from the intersection of diverse technologies, the
conjunction of new techniques and old conditions enable things to work in
new and different ways.
The technologies that have been developed within and through the Europeana project provide an opening for exploring how such failures are manifested in practice, how they are adapted and re-aligned with the aims of government and how these renegotiations require the enrollment of a variety of audiences.
The story of the development of Europeana is bound up with the EC’s ongoing
commitment to fostering European unity, emphasizing transnational, rather than
national, institutions and affiliations
In 2008, the prototype Europeana database was launched, the appellation making
its transnational affiliations clear. This was in line with EU strategies, since
the 1980s, to promote the formation of a cohesive European identity through its
cultural programs in many respects, what the [EC] is
doing is not dissimilar to that which nationalist elites achieved during
the formation of European nation-states in the nineteenth century: i.e.
mobilising symbols and inventing traditions in order to give flesh and
credibility to a new political order
European
meanings to manuscripts and artworks that are
associated with specific national-historical narratives. Likewise, the very
different circumstances from which the nation states of Europe have developed
present a challenge to the idea of a coherent European identity. Cultural
programs have attempted to overcome such disparities by inscribing diversity
into the model for European integration and endorsing the idea of unity in diversity
The motif of unity in diversity also echoes existing debates in heritage studies
about the move from monocultural to multicultural forms
In the face of vast collections like those of Europeana, a selective approach to
representation is required to make the content serviceable. The concern is that,
if the task of representing European culture in all its forms proves
insurmountable, then unity becomes a legitimating gloss for a discourse of
European culture that is limited to a narrow construction of cultural heritage.
In this context, the need to both define and safeguard European interests
reflects the difference by which Europe has historically distinguished itself
from other territories
However, the political uncertainty surrounding Europe has resulted in a need for
the EC to circumvent disputes that arise from talking about a unified European
entity directly. Anthropological research into the EC indicates that this is
manifested at an organizational level as well. Abélès suggests that the
underlying paradigm of the European political process is less one of unification
than of harmonization and rationalization. That is, European political practice
aims to influence national politics without spelling out its political goals; he
writes: everything is working as if Europe
was destined to remain a virtual object
As we will go on to argue, these relations continue to be replicated at various scales through the creation and implementation of cultural heritage technologies, including Europeana. There are also clear ways in which the policy trajectory of Europeana has changed during its lifespan, which is consistent with flexibility as a practice of government. Here, we conduct an analysis of Europeana’s conception of its audience over time as the project priorities shift; in this way, it is possible to understand Europeana’s changing self-conception and its relationship with European state and identity politics. We take as material for analysis a series of papers produced by or at the behest of people involved in various aspects of Europeana, with a particular focus on the API and the data model. These materials represent different points in Europeana’s development, including:
Notions of audience, both implicit and explicit, at each of these stages reflect the adaptations Europeana makes in order to position itself as a successful digital cultural heritage platform, although we acknowledge the difficulty entailed in defining success in this context. With each new phase of development, Europeana speaks to different audiences, including cultural heritage institutions in member states and elsewhere; internal and external technology developers; individual content donors; and the projected users who will search the platform to access digital representations of cultural heritage objects (CHOs). This latter group is represented by individual users within Europe, yet given its partnerships with non-European heritage institutions, there is also the aspiration to reach a more global audience. Decisions taken about technology primarily reflect the positioning of Europeana in relation to its users. These different users and Europeana itself are both implicated in the European identity the EC promotes. It is not insignificant that the structuring of the EDM also, superficially, reflects this idea of unity, which we will discuss below.
Despite pushing for a kind of unity, Europeana is underpinned by disparate metadata and collections information. This implies a political manoeuvre: Europeana is, on one level, an absolute expression of unity in diversity (it works as an aggregator of disparate data) but only in cases where those terms are representative of standards and data models. The vexed political question of how unity in diversity actually works is left to one side. As discussed by Abélès, unity in diversity is a process of harmonization and rationalization, and one that operates via a definitional void: when Europeana fails to define its terms, assumptions and dominant power relations risk becoming further entrenched.
How does Europeana work and what is its emphasis? This question is not trivial,
and it is telling that at a 2016 heritage studies conference, the authors
encountered far more people who had never heard of Europeana than people who
could describe the project and its aims. Answering the question requires an
understanding of what the name ‘Europeana’ encompasses. For example, Antoine
Isaac et al speak about the multiple priorities and user groups of Europeana,
which belies the fact that it is not a single entity, nor does it have a single,
sweepingly agreed-upon identity for its users and creators
The public-facing part of the project is represented by a web platform which offers access to digitized items from national museum, library and archive collections across Europe.
Its earliest iteration was modeled on the idea of a digital library. However, it
is also a database that enables participating cultural heritage organizations to
engage with a large volume of digital content, primarily metadata about digital
surrogates for CHOs. Those involved in its development have shown an awareness
of this public platform/back-end database duality: To the general public, Europeana is primarily
perceived as a portal exposing a great amount of cultural heritage
information. Even though this perception is not entirely misleading, the
main goal of Europeana is rather to build an open services platform enabling
users and cultural institutions to access and manage a large collection of
surrogate objects representing digital and digitized content via an
application program interface (API).
A more pointed quote that concludes the same paper demonstrates a measure of
tension in how the greater Europeana project is defined: Finally, Europeana is much more than a portal: even
though offering portal functionality its main technical incarnation is the
Application Programming Interface (API) on which the portal services will be
built.
As indicated, Europeana has conceived of itself and its relationship with users in different ways over its lifespan, and this is indicative of a number of tensions that have persisted within it. What Europeana is or does is informed by some early key policy decisions, chief among these the decision not to store any digital objects itself. Rather, Europeana holds metadata about digital objects from national collections. In other words, by using Europeana’s search portal, users are looking at aggregated metadata about digital surrogates for heritage objects: for example, an image file representing a painting and data about the museum to which it belongs, its size, and what the paint and backing media are etc. Europeana does not save or hold these art objects or their digital images: it simply collects data about them. When users click through the content represented at europeana.eu, they are directed away from Europeana proper to the website of the particular institution that holds the analog object and that contributed the digital surrogate and its data to the Europeana database. Example: if you want to know more about the
Concerns about ownership, and especially about the ability to point to web
traffic as a metric for successful community engagement, pervade discussions
about how Europeana should interact with one of its key audiences: cultural
heritage institutions donating their data about their collections: Europeana’s approach to aggregation is very
reasonable: aggregate the metadata, but access the digital objects from the
providers’ sites. This allows the provider to brand the content with their
own identity and to offer up navigation and context pertinent to the
content. It also precludes the need for Europeana to have to centrally store
all of the digital objects and the responsibility for preservation remains
with the owning institution.
The technological discussions raise this same concern: Cesare Concordia et al.
call for both a unified mentality
shift
when dealing with large scale aggregations while also noting
that ownership must be clearly visible to two additional key audiences: imagined
users who will visit the portal and search for content and those who will build
applications and other projects on top of the data and data model
If the foregoing section identifies three audiences – the individual searching
via the portal, the cultural heritage institutions that submit CHOs, and
developers using the API – there are a further two audiences implied in the case
set of texts about Europeana, though they are not necessarily explicitly defined
as such therein. Karen M. Wickett et al point to the audiences implied in the
functional roles of collections and collection description: individual users accessing or
contributing content, system developers seeking to improve search
experiences, and institutions providing data to federated
aggregations
I
in I-methodology
Developments that stem from Europeana, like the creation of the data model (EDM)
and an interface designed to encourage developers to use Europeana (the API) are
inflected with the identities designers have in mind and who they think they are
talking to. For example, Concordia et al write about the Europeana API to
differentiate it from other portals and other digital libraries
A competing discourse arises when the primary user audience is invoked, the
non-specialist who uses the europeana.eu search bar to look for art works. These
portal users are coded by the technical authors as detached from the complexity
of the underlying technologies, such as the call method architecture, data
system levels, and functionalities. At the same time, Concordia et al use
language about hiding
things in the API and a techno-centric discourse is
employed to purposefully mask the complexity of these functionalities behind
graphical user interfaces (GUIs): in this case, the simple search box on the
website landing page
These issues draw attention to Europeana’s lack of definition around audiences.
Because it does not concretely define audience when speaking to its
audience
writ large, it implicates a variety of actors with different
interests and levels of power in relation to the project. Defining the various
audiences of Europeana would require the explicit designation of
techno-audiences, including second-party developers at partner institutions and
external
third-party developers like the humanistic researcher
investigating watermarks on historical documents. Instead, Europeana literature
switches back and forth between discussions of the first four distinct audiences
as though they fit within the same group; moreover, it never addresses the fifth
I
audience explicitly.
What is the potential impact of eliding distinct audiences in this way? When
audiences are assumed rather than defined, they default to norms that reinforce
existing power relationships. Developers design for themselves, representing
assumed users on both the technological side, where API users may in fact share
many traits with Europeana developers, and on the public access side, where
portal users – often school children doing class projects – probably do not. As
such, the portal model suffers from not being what casual access users need in
technical terms: online access to collections is not
serving a clear user need
Europeana structures itself around its projected audiences. The most clearly
identifiable organizational audiences are also what it relies on to provide
content: both organizations and individuals donating content as well as
individuals searching for content. Yet Europeana also structures itself around
audiences that are less explicitly defined, such as those that are incorporated
into the design of the API and the EDM, which we will address in greater detail
in the next section. Europeana emphasizes the fact that it wants to
incorporate/absorb existing descriptive metadata structures in use by partner
institutions: it builds on many standards that are in popular use to maximize
the ease of interoperability and encourage the participation of institutional
partners
When the audience is functionally a mirror of the project creators, both the EC
and the tech developers, it does not necessarily reflect the way people would
actually use or contribute to a digital heritage portal. As Ben Roberts writes, how meaningful is such
participation when its terms and vocabulary are decided elsewhere?
Indeed, what can appear to happen in such debates is a kind of staged
engagement with the outside, one which simply mirrors the political
establishment
The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is the successor of the European Semantic Elements
(ESE), metadata which were used to describe the digital objects aggregated by
Europeana. Both the ESE and EDM govern the use of metadata in the larger
Europeana project, with the aim of creating interoperability between discrete
digital collections. The EDM came about in response to claims that the ESE was
inadequate to properly express the relationships between CHOs and their digital
surrogates. The EDM, a Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based data model,
incorporates the existing elements from the ESE, along with additional elements
from several other common metadata schemas such as Simple and Qualified Dublin
Core (title, format, author, etc); it is also compatible and partly aligned with
the major cultural heritage ontology, CIDOC-CRM (open
in its name suggests, is based on the ability to share metadata
to make linkages work. Because the agreement partner institutions sign with
Europeana does not entail public permissions, the exchanges of metadata
necessary to link data openly are limited. Isaac et al write about the process
of moving Europeana’s database towards open data, explaining: It was important that the solution chosen
by Europeana should reuse existing standards and be flexible enough in its
approach to interoperability to allow their coexistence with custom ones
from across the sector. Because Europeana wants to reuse and be reused, a
web-based open technology was ideal to make it simple to connect data
together and share it. Such semantic web and linked data technologies
directly relate to open data strategies.
This type of language also exemplifies attempts by those involved with Europeana
to unify elements of the project, and to project backwards a more unified vision
of Europeana’s development than other events on the timeline indicate. To
maximize interoperability, the EDM builds on a commonly used schema like the
Dublin Core Internet metadata standard. As Ashraf Amad and Nasreddine Bouhaï
explain, its primary objective is to unify
descriptions originating from various metadata providers to make data
accessible on the Europeana website independently of the metadata schema
used by the provider
However, the creation of the EDM raised concerns about a
Europeana relies on its relationships with content donors who were, until the
1914-1918 World War I project, primarily cultural heritage institutions from the
Eurozone. Such donors are contributing valuable data to Europeana: Europeana
relies on these institutions to create more or less interoperable metadata on
which the entire database and platform run and therefore relationships with
these institutions must be cultivated. If two contributing institutions submit
conflicting metadata about the same CHO, say, for example, one attributes an
anonymous artwork to one artist while another institution attributes it to
someone else, standard database logic does not allow for such contradictions to
exist simultaneously: accommodating contradictions within a database permits it
to represent all its assertions as true, as well as all its negations, which
would bring down a functional database. Yet Europeana requires a structure that
allows institutions to retain their own information as authoritatively true
precisely because it aims to side-step disagreements about artist attribution.
Therefore, developers opted for a mechanism that allows contradictions to exist
within the database without ruining the database’s functionality. This is
accomplished through the use of Enabl[ing] the separation of
different views of the same item that may be the focus of multiple
aggregations from different providers. In every case, there will be one
proxy for the provider descriptive data for an item and another for the data
created by Europeana.
Europeana developed the proxy notion from the Open Reuse and Exchange (ORE)
specification
These contradictions are especially important in the cultural heritage sector
when representing information such as provenance, which can be questionable and
institutionally dependent, or date ranges which differ depending on perspectives
and definitions. Contradictions must be represented in a way that retains the
integrity of the database structure, and this can be challenging. For example,
in an LOD project using CIDOC-CRM to create an interoperable LOD dataset of
World War I data and objects, the authors note: formal encoding of such different
viewpoints has been discussed, but remains future work
The politics embedded in the technological foundations of the EDM allow the contributing institutions a measure of autonomy that has, in turn, solidified the functionality of the Europeana project as a whole. There is a difficulty in the work of an aggregator like Europeana in that it is engaged, by definition, with many partners. As such, this tension can be described partly as one of scale: in moving beyond a single institution, Europeana must find a way to grant a visible measure of authority to many partners across many nations.
Digital archive technologies describe such problems of scale for heritage
representations as technical ones, thus depoliticizing or decentring the friction
A key feature of the governmental rationality of all and each is that it can be
made to accommodate the politics of difference. It is flexible and aimed at
absorbing that which initially seems to unsettle it, making the seamful appear
seamless
This issue links back to the definitional void described above: the lack of definition for a European cultural heritage in Europeana mirrors a lack of definition around the European project more generally. Europeana operates as a form of soft power and a somewhat indirect arbiter, making its power all the more difficult to render visible. In entering into data agreements for aggregation, cultural heritage institutions enter into the all and each dynamic: the actions they take to exert authority over their own collections, while perhaps raising their own profile through their partnership with Europeana, are mutually constitutive of the governmental rationality of culture exercised by the EC.
In this article, we have argued that the study of Europeana has much to contribute to the debates about the relationship between technical expertise, the representation of heritage, and the exercise of government. First, this case study demonstrates the move of all and each; all and each is embedded in Europeana’s very invitation to participate and it implicates its conception of audiences in the same gesture. Second, it highlights the effects of a definitional void: dominant power relations fill a definitional void. The ambition of the EC is unity, but if and when it cannot express that directly, particularly in the current fraught political environment, it instead chooses to emphasize diversity. This is not a logically incompatible goal, but it moves people in an indirect trajectory towards unity: the terms change, but the goal does not.
The indirect movement towards unity is reflected in the development of the EDM, a
space that masks frictional aspects of its networks and relationships
Friction, as Tsing describes it, has the potential to be productive
Yet, as we have also argued, technical solutions for political problems do not
necessarily work, even when they
The authors wish to acknowledge the collegial support of Dr. David Dubin in the research and writing of this article.