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Global tech companies first began to make serious moves into the business of mining cultural resources for their data potential nearly a decade ago. Today, some of the world’s top fine art collections have been aggregated and made searchable and dynamically malleable online thanks, in part, to the investment of museums and academic institutions in building accessible digital collections. Taking into account the resources afforded to the world’s biggest tech giants, and the implications of their extraction and mobilization of personal or institutional data, this panel is instead interested in exploring how individual non-profit institutions devoted to the preservation and interpretation of the visual arts are tackling innovative projects using emerging technologies that are scaled to their respective audiences and missions.

This panel's presentations feature museum, library, and/or academic initiatives seeking to develop new knowledge resources that harness the structure, content, and affordances of robust digital collections to contextualize, narrativize, or otherwise activate a collection’s assets. How might we determine and measure the pedagogical and public benefits of bridging the sometimes overdetermined boundaries of the archive and its potential interpretations? What are the infrastructural and technological challenges to these projects, and how do we critically design solutions to address the divisions and disparities they reinforce? Where is the deep knowledge of art historians, curators, art librarians, and archivists engaging with emerging technologies to create new knowledge, new access, and new resources, and how do these projects potentially highlight or obscure the often invisible labor performed in the archive?