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The Dissertation Committee for Tiancheng Leo Cao certifies that this is the approved version of
the following dissertation:
Platforming Digital Cultural Heritage: History, Curation, and Platform
Governance on Google Arts & Culture
Committee:
Sharon Strover, Supervisor
Caroline Frick
Astrid Runggaldier
Bjarki Valtýsson
Karin de Wild
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Platforming Digital Cultural Heritage: History, Curation, and Platform
Governance on Google Arts & Culture
by
Tiancheng Leo Cao
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
August 2024
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Abstract
Platforming Digital Cultural Heritage: History, Curation, and Platform
Governance on Google Arts & Culture
Tiancheng Leo Cao, PhD
The University of Texas at Austin, 2024
Supervisor: Sharon Strover
This dissertation examines the intersection of cultural institutions and digital platforms,
using Google Arts & Culture (GA&C) as a case study of platformization in the cultural sector.
Theoretically, it situates GA&C within the intellectual and institutional lineage of the virtual
museum, frames the platform as a networked memory institution with risks of digital enclosure
and privatization, and unpacks its sociotechnical power through its various governance
mechanisms. This study addresses three primary research questions: How did the platform
evolve from the original Google Art Project into the current iteration of GA&C? How do the
platform’s curatorial interventions and interface design shape content presentation? How do
cultural institutions use the platform? A mixed-methods approach is adopted, including archival
analysis of the platform’s website, mobile app, and outreach emails, content analysis of a highly
curated section of the platform, visual analysis of the platform’s interface architecture, and semi-
structured interviews with partner institutions. Key findings reveal a history of convergence among
dierent cultural institutions on the platform but also a divergence from facilitating cultural
institutions to engaging audiences through playful experience. The GA&C team plays an essential
curatorial and editorial role in deciding project topics and managing featured content, while the
platform’s interface prescribes a passive mode of user engagement that falls short of the
promises of a truly participatory culture. While cultural institutions hoped for an aggregate portal
with technological support from Google to expand their digital presence, the alignment between
the platform and the partners, often a response to the partner’s internal digital strategy or external
factors such as the global pandemic, ended up being contingent and experimental due to various
issues on both sides. Finally, this dissertation also discusses the implications of GA&C for the
participatory culture, the editorial role of digital platforms, and the datafication of arts and culture.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables .................................................................................................................................... 7
List of Figures .................................................................................................................................. 8
Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................................................. 9
Museums and Platforms ...................................................................................................... 10
Along Came Google ............................................................................................................. 13
Enclosure and Platformization ............................................................................................. 15
Organization of the Dissertation ........................................................................................... 17
Chapter 2: Literature Review ........................................................................................................ 19
From the Art Project to Google Arts & Culture ..................................................................... 20
The Oicial Origin Story ............................................................................................ 20
The Transition to GA&C Now .................................................................................... 22
Summary .................................................................................................................. 25
The History of the Virtual Museum ....................................................................................... 28
From Domestic Pinacotheca to the Imaginary Museum .......................................... 28
Implementing the Virtual Museum ........................................................................... 30
GA&C as Virtual Museum ......................................................................................... 33
Summary .................................................................................................................. 35
From Digital Convergence to Digital Enclosure .................................................................... 36
Digital Convergence in Memory Institutions ............................................................. 36
Enclosure of the Cultural Commons ........................................................................ 38
GA&C as Networked Memory Institution ................................................................. 42
Summary .................................................................................................................. 43
Platforms and Digital Cultural Heritage ................................................................................ 43
The Rise of the Platform ........................................................................................... 44
Platform Governance: From Infrastructure to Interface ........................................... 47
Cultural Institutions as Platform Complementors ................................................... 50
GA&C as Platform Provider ...................................................................................... 52
Summary .................................................................................................................. 53
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Chapter 3: Methods ...................................................................................................................... 54
RQ1: Reconstructing Platform Timeline ............................................................................... 55
Archival Analysis ...................................................................................................... 55
RQ2: Analyzing Content Presentation .................................................................................. 57
Content Analysis ...................................................................................................... 57
Discursive Interface Analysis ................................................................................... 58
RQ3: Unveiling Platform Use ................................................................................................ 59
Semi-Structured Interviews ..................................................................................... 60
Chapter 4: Reconstructing Platform Timeline: A Story of Convergence and Divergence .............. 66
Google Cultural Institute? A Story of Convergence .............................................................. 66
Appnography and the Gamification of User Experience ....................................................... 71
Mission Statements, Greetings, and Updates ...................................................................... 81
Summary .............................................................................................................................. 86
Chapter 5: Dissecting Content Presentation: From Editorial Intervention to Interface Design ..... 88
The Curatorial Function of the Platform ............................................................................... 88
Today ’s Top Picks: The Platform as Content Creator ............................................................ 93
The Platform as an Interface Regime .................................................................................. 101
Summary ............................................................................................................................ 112
Chapter 6: Unveiling Platform Use: Platform Governance Meets Institutional Practices ........... 114
Why Cultural Institutions Joined Google ............................................................................ 115
The Ones that Got Away: Where Platform Boundaries End................................................ 119
The Mesoamerica Center: The Promise That Was Not ........................................... 120
Harry Ransom Center: Conditioned Visibility ......................................................... 123
Issues Experienced by Partner Institutions ........................................................................ 125
Resources and Priorities ........................................................................................ 125
Motive and Commercialization .............................................................................. 126
Content Creation .................................................................................................... 129
Internal Dynamics .................................................................................................. 134
Summary ............................................................................................................................ 140
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Chapter 7: Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 143
Synthesis of Key Findings ................................................................................................... 143
Rethinking Participation, Privatization, and Platformization ............................................... 146
Whose Participation? ............................................................................................. 146
The Irrelevance of Algorithms? ............................................................................... 148
The Googlization of Arts and Culture? .................................................................... 148
Lessons for Cultural Institutions ........................................................................................ 150
Beyond This Dissertation .................................................................................................... 151
Appendix A: Interview Questions................................................................................................ 154
Appendix B: TTP Distribution by Country .................................................................................... 155
References .................................................................................................................................. 156
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List of Tables
Table 1. Interviewed institutions with the number of items and stories ................................ 63
Table 2. The oicial update log of the app ............................................................................. 73
Table 3. The dates and subject lines of all 12 emails shared by one institution..................... 84
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List of Figures
Figure 1. The menu structure of GA&C’s current website ....................................................... 27
Figure 2. The result page of X Degrees of Separation .............................................................. 34
Figure 3. The distribution of item and story numbers among U.S.-based institutions ............. 65
Figure 4. The distribution of item and story numbers for population and sample ................... 65
Figure 5. Google Art Project homepage .................................................................................. 68
Figure 6. Google Art Project homepage .................................................................................. 68
Figure 7. Google Cultural Institute homepage ........................................................................ 69
Figure 8. Google Art Project homepage .................................................................................. 70
Figure 9. Earlier app versions that cannot be retrieved ........................................................... 75
Figure 10. The earliest version of the app that can be retrieved ................................................ 76
Figure 11. The addition of a new tab for camera-based features .............................................. 77
Figure 12. The addition of an Achievements section ................................................................ 78
Figure 13. The addition of a dedicated Play tab ......................................................................... 79
Figure 14. The revamp of the app on July 18 of 2023 ................................................................ 80
Figure 15. Breakdown of TTP by content type ........................................................................... 95
Figure 16. A typical story layout, with title, description, and name of the creator ..................... 97
Figure 17. Breakdown of TTP by content creator ...................................................................... 97
Figure 18. Breakdown of TTP by country ................................................................................. 100
Figure 19. TTP content distribution by country over time ........................................................ 100
Figure 20a. The Milkmaid on Google Arts & Culture ................................................................. 102
Figure 20b. The Milkmaid on Rijksmuseum .............................................................................. 103
Figure 20c. The Milkmaid on Europeana ................................................................................... 104
Figure 21. The download option provided by Rijksmuseum .................................................... 106
Figure 22. The download option provided by Europeana ........................................................ 107
Figure 23. The download option for public domain images contributed by The MET .............. 109
Figure 24. A user-created gallery about the Chiaroscuro technique ....................................... 111
Figure 25. The GA&C story editor interface ............................................................................. 130
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Chapter 1: Introduction
The possibilities of reproducing created colored harmonies: pictures, even in their
contemporary form, enable many people to procure stimulating color compositions […],
although the radio picture service as a source of more intensive distribution is probably
still to come. (Moholy-Nagy, 1925/1969, p. 25)
We […] have far more great works available to refresh our memories than those which
even the greatest of museums could bring together. For a “Museum without Walls” is
coming into being, and (now that the plastic arts have invented their own printing-press) it
will carry infinitely farther that revelation of the world of art. (Malraux, 1953/1974, p. 16)
When László Moholy-Nagy, artist and a fervent champion for the integration of technology
into the arts, imagined the domestic pinacotheca in the 1920s, and when André Malraux, novelist
and France’s inaugural Minister of Cultural Aairs, conceived the imaginary museum in the 1950s,
they would never have foreseen the kind of intensive distribution aorded by what human
histories have come to know as the Internet. Decades later, the idea of a virtual museum, Internet
“picture service” carrying us “infinitely farther” into the world of art, has become the reality, if not
the default and the norm, and unfortunately the only option for many people to access arts and
culture during the global pandemic. Despite the museum’s traditional focus on material artifacts,
media and communication technologies – from television to the Internet, from video disc to virtual
reality – have been an integral part of the museum’s institutional history in the twentieth century,
through which artworks have metamorphized through the ages of mechanical reproduction
(Benjamin, 1936/2019), digital reproduction (Davis, 1995; Schweibenz, 2018), and what we may
as well now call algorithmic reproduction: from the fleeting fervor for digital artworks traded using
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to the meteoric rise of images created by generative AI. At its core, this
dissertation is about the intersection between museums and media technologies, focusing on the
emergence and dominance of digital platforms as they have transformed and continue to shape
all aspects of social life.
When the pandemic abruptly shut down most museums in early 2020, Internet search
traic for “Google Arts & Culture” saw a fivefold increase, as art lovers and cultural institutions
flocked to the site hosting digital museum collections and scrambled to keep themselves and
their audiences engaged (Gaskin, 2020). Moholy-Nagy and Malraux would have been heartened
to see the initiative’s mission “to preserve and bring the world’s art and culture online so it’s
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accessible to anyone, anywhere” (Google, 2020), but the idealistic and egalitarian corporate
rhetoric obscures as much as it reveals. Google’s expansion into arts and culture, as I argue in this
dissertation, deserves our critical attention because the cultural heritage commons is at stake.
Digital platforms provided by private technology companies, often disguised in the discourse of
democratizing public access, have been accused of facilitating economic processes centered on
the collection of user data and the creation of platform-dependent social transactions. Is Google
Arts & Culture (GA&C) yet another chapter in this narrative? In this dissertation, I seek to provide a
nuanced account of how cultural institutions have responded to Google’s venture into the cultural
heritage sector.
This is by no means a deterministic account of how one company single-handedly
attempts to disrupt an entire sector, for better or worse. Google is far from the first or only p l aye r,
public or private, that has attempted to digitize, preserve, and disseminate our collective cultural
heritage. Numerous local, national, and supranational eorts have predated or paralleled GA&C
(Marcum & Schonfeld, 2021; Valtýsson, 2020a). What makes the emergence of the initiative
uniquely emblematic, on top of its global reach and totalizing overtone, is its situation at the
convergence of two broader trends: museums have increasingly embraced, or been compelled to
rely on, media technologies and platform companies for both their internal functions and external
communications, while digital platforms, dominated by U.S.-based technology companies, have
increasingly penetrated the cultural sector, both supplementing and substituting the functions of
traditional memory institutions. The confluence of museums and platforms perfectly instantiates
the process of platformization, as the infrastructures, economic processes, and governance
frameworks of digital platforms have restructured the organizational practices of cultural
institutions (Poell et al., 2019). In this dissertation, I analyze the GA&C platform to understand
how this process of platformization has unfolded among cultural institutions, especially the ways
in which the platform’s infrastructural services, economic logic, and governance mechanisms
have reshaped their everyday operations.
Museums and Platforms
Despite the rise of platformization as a conceptual framework in recent academic
discourse, especially in media and communication studies, the intertwining of cultural institutions
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and digital platforms has long existed in practice. Many innovative museum initiatives emerging
since the 2000s have been gradually outsourced to private digital platforms. For example, The
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) launched its online educational program MoMA Learning in 2006
and a blog site Inside/Out in 2009. Both initiatives were hailed as exemplary eorts that extended
the museum’s educational and communicative functions beyond its physical locations (Bautista,
2014). However, MoMA announced in 2016 that the blog would cease production and be migrated
to Medium, a private online publishing platform (Persse, 2016). MoMA Learning was phased out in
2018 and moved to Coursera, a commercial platform that specializes in providing online courses
(MoMA, n.d.). In a similar fate, ArtBabble, an award-winning art video hosting service launched in
2009 by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and once dubbed “the YouTube of the arts” (Jamieson,
2009), ceased operation in 2015 and was oicially shut down in 2019, citing both unsustainable
technology and competitive content hosting services (e.g., YouTube and Vimeo) as reasons for its
discontinuation (ArtBabble, n.d.). More recently, museums have increasingly relied on social
media platforms to communicate with their audiences (Russo, 2012; Laws, 2015; Wilson-
Barnao, 2017; Valtýsson, 2022). Even when they are not intentionally operating on any specific
platforms, tracking technologies (e.g., cookies and pixels) that are built into museum websites
can still collect, aggregate, and monetize the behavioral data of website visitors, not only making
these data “platform ready” (Helmond, 2015) but also rendering cultural institutions unwitting
contributors to an enormous ad-based business model widely adopted by platform companies
such as Facebook and Google. These cases of platform mechanisms intertwining with
institutional practices provide the background against which GA&C emerged as yet another
instance of platformization.
The reasons behind the confluence of cultural institutions and digital platforms are
multifold. Museums have long sought to redefine their role in society, especially since the
emergence of the new museology as an intellectual and ideological discourse in the late 1980s.
This movement called on museums to prioritize their institutional purposes over technical
methods (e.g., curatorial and displaying techniques), challenged the centrality of collections and
curatorship, interrogated their cultural authority vis-à-vis the public, and foregrounded their
informational base and educational function (Vergo, 1989; Bennett, 1990; Stam, 1993). The
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transition to a new museology required museums to transform themselves “from being about
something to being for somebody” (Weil, 1999, p. 229). The advent of Web 2.0 technologies in the
early 2000s reinforced this institutional reorientation, championing (perhaps too optimistically)
the rhetoric of their democratizing potential. Regardless, a participatory turn gradually emerged in
museum studies around the 2010s and promoted such crowdsourcing and co-creation practices
as social tagging and community archiving (Simon, 2010; Giaccardi, 2012; Cook, 2013; Kidd,
2014; Bautista, 2014; Laws, 2015). These internal transformations have motivated museums to
increasingly focus on the needs of the audiences and meet them where they are. Ultimately,
communicative practices mediated by digital platforms have come to play a constitutive role for
the very identity of the museum itself (Drotner et al., 2019).
Externally, the rise of neoliberalism in many western democracies in the latter half of the
twentieth century has characterized the broader cultural policy environments in which cultural
institutions increasingly have to operate with a market‐oriented mentality (Hesmondhalgh et al.,
2015; McGuigan, 2005). As a consequence, corporate sponsorship has gradually replaced the
funding of arts and culture through direct public subsidy, whereas public-oriented cultural
institutions have increasingly been pressured to run as financially self-sustaining private
businesses (McGuigan, 2005). In particular, museums were forced to abandon the old selling
mode, in which they convince the public to accept their cultural oerings, and operate under a
new marketing mode, in which they are expected to identify and satisfy the public’s needs on its
own terms (Weil, 1999). Museums, as entrepreneurial institutions within a nation’s cultural
industry, now must collaborate and/or compete with other entertainment and tourist destinations
to demonstrate their added value to a public increasingly understood as consumers rather than
citizens (Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005; Miller & Yúdice, 2002).
Although the neoliberal marketization of the cultural sector occurred in most West
European and North American countries, it is important to emphasize the distinct cultural policy
environment in the U.S., which, for historical and political reasons, lacks the sort of centralized
public support for the arts by the national government commonly observed in many European
countries. Instead, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, private individuals, and local
governments play a primary role in supporting cultural institutions (Wyszomirski, 2004; Mulcahy,
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2006; Cherbo et al., 2008). This policy distinction, along with other dierences in terms of
government regulation, has granted the private sector an outsized influence on the U.S. cultural
sector. It is for these reasons that this dissertation will focus primarily on cultural institutions in
the U.S. and how they use and interact with GA&C.
Along Came Google
Having established a bourgeoning web search business, Google’s first major foray into the
cultural sector started in 2004 with its announcement of the Google Print project. Later renamed
Google Book Search and eventually Google Books, this initiative sought to digitize books from
publishers and library partners worldwide and allow the public to search and view a digital copy of
the scanned materials, in full-text or preview snippets depending on the book’s copyright status.
Since its very inception, however, Google Books was criticized on the grounds of copyright
infringement, user privacy violations, cultural ethnocentrism, anti-competitive practices, and an
overall lack of transparency regarding the scanning of books (Jeanneney, 2007; Levy, 2011;
Vaidhyanathan, 2011; Thylstrup, 2019; Marcum & Schonfeld, 2021). After a series of lawsuits and
negotiations, Google and the publishers reached a settlement in 2011 that would have created a
business model to distribute subscription and advertising revenue among all the parties, but this
settlement was rejected by a U.S. federal judge (Page, 2011). The scanning operations drastically
slowed down afterwards and were all but shut down by 2017 (Somers, 2017).
Describing Google’s vision of the universal library as a technocentric approach to an old
idea, Marcum and Schonfeld (2021) provided a detailed account of how the company attempted
to disrupt the library and publishing communities, “a story about the limitations of disruptive
techno-solutionism in the face of well-coordinated incumbent market leaders, and a story in
which some librarians have limited the dream because of financial restrictions and failure of will”
(p. 10). Taking a more sympathetic view towards the librarians, Thylstrup (2019) considered their
responses not so much a failure of will as a form of active resistance that defended a library ethos
fundamental to state-subsidized cultural institutions that promise to deliver access and
transparency to the wider public in exchange for their financial and moral support. Regardless of
the role of the libraries in the eventual doom of Google’s endeavor, “the clash between the
traditional infrastructures of the analog book and the new infrastructures of Google Books was
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symptomatic of the underlying radical reorganization of information from a state of trade and
exchange to a state of constant transmission and contagion” (p. 46). This radical reorganization,
as it turned out, soon crept into the museum sector.
While Google was still mired in lawsuits and settlement negotiations, the Google Cultural
Institute – a somewhat opaque internal team whose exact organizational status was never
publicly specified – launched the Art Project on February 1 of 2011, with initial contributions from
17 world-renowned museums in nine countries (Sood, 2011). Renamed Google Arts & Culture in
2016 (Osborn, 2016), the platform claims to oer, as of June 2024, more than 3,000 participating
cultural institutions free access to digitization services, a collection management system, and an
online publishing platform (Google, 2020). For individual users, the platform’s main features
include virtual tours of the museum space or heritage site, “in-painting tours” that guide users to
zoom in on the artworks to explore hidden details, and camera-based mobile tools using VR, AR,
and other AI-enabled functions. A dedicated “Experiments” section also features games and
visualization projects by artists and creative coders in collaboration with GA&C.1
At first glance, Google seemed to have learned its lesson from the Books project: GA&C
was designated as a non-profit initiative from the very beginning,2 and participating institutions are
required to provide only copyright-free or copyright-cleared content. More importantly, despite
some initial hesitation among museum professionals, viewing artworks online turned out to
supplement rather than substitute for in-person visits, gradually dispelling concerns about
possible revenue loss that angered many book publishers and authors in the case of Google
Books (Kelly, 2013). Although not without criticism, media coverage and institutional partners
have mostly lauded the expanded access and democratizing potential of the platform for
students, educators, and art lovers who may otherwise never have the opportunity to visit these
museums in person (Berwick, 2011; Pfanner, 2011; Sooke, 2011; Stromberg, 2012; Warman,
2011). What could possibly go wrong?
1 In December 2023, Google announced that it would gradually phase out the “Experiments with Google” website and
transition to Labs.Google, a new site dedicated to AI technologies. See https://experiments.withgoogle.com.
2 This “non-profit” self-designation was changed to “non-commercial” in May 2022. See Chapter 4, footnote 17.
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Enclosure and Platformization
Google’s expansion into arts and culture deserves critical interrogation because the digital
cultural commons is at stake. Vaidhyanathan (2011) first popularized the phrase “the Googlization
of everything” and cautioned against the still rising company as a ubiquitous force permeating our
contemporary culture. Vaidhyanathan considered Google Books an attempt to privatize and
commercialize libraries and academia, whose core purpose should be “to act as an information
commons for the community” (p. 164). Similarly, Pélissier (2021) considered libraries as part of
the heritage commons, arguing that Google Books revealed an “intrusion and domination of
private companies in a sector hitherto reserved for non-market cultural institutions” (p. 150). The
growing danger of the private sector intruding the heritage commons, or “the enclosure of the
intangible commons of the mind” (Boyle, 2003, p. 37), is why initiatives such as GA&C deserve
more critical scrutiny.
At the heart of the second enclosure (Boyle, 2003) is a wide array of legal, managerial, and
technological strategies for private corporations to control and commodify data, information, and
intellectual property. Pessach (2008), for instance, argued that copyright laws are responsible for
not only commodifying both the inputs and the outputs of traditional memory institutions, but also
making them more inclined to adopt proprietary practices. Wilson-Barnao (2017) examined how
the rhetoric of access transforms the museum from a community space to an advertising
resource. In other words, the enclosure of our digital cultural commons, often disguised in the
discourse of access, is ultimately designed to facilitate processes of datafication as a new form of
extraction that transforms hitherto unmeasurable social interactions into massive amounts of
behavioral data (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; van Dijck, 2014; Mejias & Couldry, 2019;
Zubo, 2019).
Digital platforms facilitate these processes by bridging interactions between users, third
parties, and institutional actors such as libraries and museums. When GA&C oers free tools and
resources to institutional partners, it also enables the platform’s expansion “by codifying and
standardizing infrastructural access and integration” (Poell et al., 2022, p. 67), paving the way for
the formalization of platform-dependent cultural heritage reproduction. This dependence, in turn,
is maintained through various governance mechanisms, ranging from contracts and access
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policies, interface design, content curation, and infrastructural integration. Despite the claims of
platform companies, platforms are “neither neutral nor value-free constructs; they come with
specific norms and values inscribed in their architectures” (van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 3). The
ideological dimension of platforms, if not digital technologies at large, has a long intellectual
history, from the classic aphorism “code is law” (Lessig, 1999), to understanding new media as a
language with its distinct governing principles (Manovich, 2002), default settings as behavioral
nudges expressive of an ideology (Vaidhyanathan, 2011), and the interface as an enveloping
discourse with unique eects (Galloway, 2012; Ash, 2015; Stanfill, 2015). Platforms, in short,
“don’t just mediate public discourse, they constitute it” (Gillespie, 2018, p. 22).
From terms of service to interface architecture, many governance mechanisms are
present on GA&C, but content curation, given the term’s original use in the museum context,
deserves some special attention. Although institutional partners can curate online exhibits, many
of them have in fact been created by GA&C itself, which already refutes any claim of the platform
as a mere facilitator. In addition to deciding what content appears on its front page and what
trending topics to promote on a regular basis, GA&C literalized its editorial role in August 2020
when the platform added a new section called “Today’s top picks,” showcasing five stories every
day usually located at the top of the site’s homepage. Since these picks are not personalized
based on user profiles, what has been the basis for the selection? These perhaps incidental acts
of cultural canonization became problematic when a special project about Egypt was introduced
on August 21, 2021. Titled Ancient Egypt: Mummies and Mysteries, this project featured
collections exclusively from 14 European and American museums, and not a single Egyptian
institution was included. Another incident happened on August 22, 2022, when the “Museum
Explorer” section at the top of the homepage featured the National Palace Museum in Taipei, but
following the link would somehow lead users to the landing page of The Palace Museum in Beijing.
Was the Ancient Egypt project an example of digital cultural colonialism (Kizhner et al., 2020) that
continues the exploitation and misrepresentation of non-western cultural heritage in the digital
space? Did the mix-up between the two Palace Museums not reflect the platform’s embedded
lack of cultural sensitivity towards historical conflicts and contemporary geopolitics? We may
never have the answers, but these questions are precisely why Google’s editorial interventions in
17
the cultural sector need to be critically interrogated, especially when these deeply political
interventions are being delivered through platforms that are too often veneered with an “aura of
truth, objectivity, and accuracy” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 663).
Organization of the Dissertation
From the enclosure of cultural commons, to the platformization of museum collections,
and to the creation of a new curatorial regime, Google’s continuing venture into the cultural sector
involves more than what its idealistic corporate mission claims. This dissertation revolves around
the notion of platformization as it unfolds in the cultural sector through the ongoing expansion of
the GA&C platform, which itself has undergone significant changes in the past 13 years. Just as
Poell et al. (2019) dissected the concept of platformization as the mutual articulation between
institutional changes and cultural practices, so too this dissertation approaches the
platformization of museum collections from the perspective of both the platform and the
participating institutions. This two-pronged approach is based on the understanding that platform
governance is “multiple, contingent and contested” (Katzenbach & Ulbricht, 2019, p. 9). Although
GA&C imposes institutional and productive power through myriad governance mechanisms,
these power dynamics are not unconditional or uncontested, as cultural institutions may strive to
retain their agency and autonomy by selectively accepting what Google has to oer based on their
own needs. This dissertation therefore investigates what the platform aords its partner
institutions and how they in turn use the platform. Specifically, in this dissertation I seek to
address three primary research questions:
• RQ1: How did the initiative evolve from the original Google Art Project into the current
iteration of Google Arts & Culture?
• RQ2: How does Google Arts & Culture present cultural content on the platform?
o RQ2a: What types of curatorial interventions does the platform perform?
o RQ2b: How does the platform’s interface design condition the presentation of
individual cultural objects?
• RQ3: How do cultural institutions use Google Arts & Culture?
o RQ3a: Why did institutions decide (not) to join the platform?
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o RQ3b: How do institutions utilize the platform’s tools and resources?
o RQ3c: How is the use of the platform influenced by its governance mechanisms?
The remainder of the dissertation is organized as follows: in Chapter 2, I begin with a
description of the platform’s current operations, before presenting a literature review of existing
research to contextualize the discussion of GA&C. In particular, I focus on 1) the concept of the
virtual museum, emphasizing the role of audiences as active participants, 2) the emergence of
networked memory institutions and the implications of datafication and digital enclosure, and 3)
the process of platformization, with an emphasis on the platform’s governance mechanisms. In
Chapter 3, I present my analytical methods and empirical data used to address not only what the
platform does but also how its institutional partners use the platform. I adopted a mixed-methods
approach that includes archival analysis, content analysis, discursive interface analysis, and in-
depth interviews. In Chapters 4-6, I present the findings of my empirical research and situate
these findings within the theoretical framework established in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 addresses
RQ1 by reconstructing a historical timeline of the platform, highlighting the trend of convergence
on the platform and the divergence of the mobile app into elements of gamification. Chapter 5
addresses RQ2 by shedding light on the decision-making processes of the GA&C team and
foregrounding the normative nature of the platform’s interface architecture. Chapter 6 addresses
RQ3 by identifying the motivations of cultural institutions to work with Google, perceived benefits
and concerns, and how, if at all, the collaboration has changed the institution’s internal practices.
Ultimately, as Google continues to structure and order access to our collective knowledge and
culture, I seek to unveil what the company’s foray into arts and culture truly means for cultural
institutions beyond the glorified rhetoric of preservation and universal access.
19
Chapter 2: Literature Review
In this chapter, I describe the Google Arts & Culture platform in more detail and discuss
existing research related to the virtual museum, digital enclosure, and platform governance to
contextualize the analysis of the platform. These concepts situate GA&C within broader scholarly
discourses about the intersection between cultural institutions and media technologies. As I seek
to demonstrate in this chapter, the historical vision of the virtual museum, from avant-garde
artists in the 1920s to museum practitioners in the 1990s, emphasized the value of experimenting
with media technologies to expand access to museum collections, highlighted the importance of
interactivity in exhibition design, and sought to engage the audiences as active participants rather
than passive spectators. The GA&C platform, while implementing many aspects of this concept,
has not always lived up to the full potential of the participatory culture. Instead of engaging users
as active, co-creating participants, the platform’s main features – from virtual tours to interactive
games – equate active participation with, if not reducing it to, mere interactivity, thus perpetuating
a passive mode of cultural consumption. Moreov e r, the rhetoric of democratizing access through
new technologies belies the invisible processes of datafication, enclosing traditional memory
institutions inside new economic and cultural infrastructures controlled by private corporations.
For GA&C, this control is realized and reinforced through a series of governance mechanisms and
ultimately serves to produce new forms of digital cultural heritage that are decidedly platform
dependent.
Far from being placed on a pedestal, the museum as a social institution also wields
tremendous power in representing or repressing the collective cultural memories of our
contemporary societies. Storytelling with decontextualized artifacts is inherently political, and
curation is an interpretative process literally combining selective inclusion and (more often than
not) systematic exclusion. The western art canon established over the past few centuries by the
museum is more than an aesthetic assertion, “not simply a designation by category, but a
performative act that exalts one thing over another” (Hein, 1993, p. 556), “a structure of power, a
criterion of authority, and a legitimizing argument” (Rodríguez-Ortega, 2018. p. 3). Digital
platforms inherit and amplify the power of storytelling and canonization and continue to,
selectively and systematically, exalt and legitimize one thing over another. The dierence, at least
20
in the case of GA&C, is that private companies, algorithms, and users have in part usurped the
position of power long held by curators, historians, and sometimes politicians. The increasing
dependence on platforms challenges the authority and even legitimacy of traditional cultural
institutions. This dissertation analyzes the kind of platform power Google wields over the cultural
sector and unpacks its control based on the concepts of virtual museum, digital enclosure, and
platform governance.
This chapter is organized into four sections. First, I provide a brief summary of the
initiative’s oicial origin story and early development based on press coverage at the time, as well
as a description of the platform in its current edition, including the conditions under which cultural
institutions can join the platform, the tools and services it provides for partner institutions, and
the types of content and activities oered to users. In the next section, I trace the intellectual
origin and institutional history of the virtual museum, as avant-garde artists in the 1920s and
museum practitioners in the 1990s experimented with new technologies to expand public access
to museum collections beyond their physical walls. In the third section, I examine the emergence
of networked memory institutions and the digital enclosure of the cultural heritage commons,
which transform public cultural resources into private economic assets through datafication. In
the final section, I present the platform as a new form of economic structure, social paradigm,
and productive power, highlighting the ways in which it has reshaped various social spheres with
infrastructural services and governance frameworks through the process of platformization.
These four sections combine to provide the historical background and theoretical framework of
the dissertation and set up the next chapter in which I introduce the analytical methods and
empirical data used for the analyses.
From the Art Project to Google Arts & Culture
The Oicial Origin Story
“In the beginning, there was Google Books.” This is how the oicial Google Books website
introduces the project (Google Books, 2012). The biblical overtone ties the conception of Google
Books to the original vision of the company’s cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, when they
were still graduate students working on a project funded by the Stanford Digital Library Project in
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1996. Both in terms of the intended goal (to build a universally accessible digital library) and the
underlying technology (a crawler called BackRub, the basis of the PageRank algorithms), Google
Books was the prototypical Google. Fast forward to February 2011: Google’s universal digital
museum ambition had a much humbler beginning. In an oicial blog post, the Head of then
Google Art Project Amit Sood announced:
It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think
about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible
– not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their
doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real
thing up close.
We’re also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and
to have colleagues who love a challenge – like building brand-new technology to enable
Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums
around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for
yourself today at www.googleartproject.com. (Sood, 2011)
The 20% project refers to the company’s “20% rule” that encourages employees, “in
addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most
benefit Google” (Page & Brin, 2004). The beginning of the Art Project was thus a side project for
art-loving employees who sought to utilize Google’s existing technologies – Picasa (a retired
image viewing and organizing system), App Engine (a cloud computing platform for developing and
hosting web applications), and Street View – to give users “a fun and unusual way to interact with
art – and hopefully [inspire them] to visit the real thing” (Sood, 2011). The features highlighted in
the blog post showcased exactly what these technologies were capable of: zooming into the
artworks in greater detail, exploring the museum space in virtual tours, and building one’s own
personalized collection to share online.
Not unlike Google’s early book digitization eorts, the operation of the Art Project was
shrouded in secrecy, except for a handful of oicial blog posts and media interviews with team
members over the years that occasionally shed light on its otherwise obscure development. An
Art in America article revealed that Google executives began reaching out to museum partners in
mid-2009 (Berwick, 2011). In a 2013 interview with The Guardian, Sood suggested that he started
working on the Art Project full time since mid-2012 and that the project was part of the Google
22
Cultural Institute (Caines, 2013). However, most news media, scholars, and even some Google
employees would simply use “Art Project” and “Cultural Institute” interchangeably. A 2011 New
York Times article commented that “the activities of the Cultural Institute dier from some other
Google initiatives in that there are few outward signs of the company’s involvement” (Pfanner,
2011), attesting to the lack of clarity and transparency regarding the role of the Cultural Institute
within the company’s overall organizational structure. Indeed, the limited press releases and
news articles over the years have painted a rather fragmented picture of the initiative’s early
development. Its oicial origin story is incomplete and conveniently sanitized at best, obscuring,
as I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5, the essential editorial and curatorial functions it fulfills.
The Transition to GA&C Now
The Art Project’s initial 17 partners included some of the world’s most popular museums:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York City, the State Hermitage Museum in St.
Petersburg, Tate Britain and The National Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Uizi Gallery in Florence, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
(Sood, 2011). As of June 2024, the number of GA&C’s partner institutions worldwide has reached
over 3,000. Every partner institution has a home page on the platform, typically including a short
description with links to its social media profiles, stories curated by the institution, a preview of
the entire collection based on art medium, style, or topic, a strip of thumbnails showing all
uploaded items sorted by popularity, time, or color, a list of available virtual tours, and an
embedded Google Maps interface followed by practical information such as opening times and
current exhibitions.
While Google reached out to its earliest museum partners, the initiative underwent major
expansions in 2012, when it began allowing institutions to self-nominate through a signup form
that gathers preliminary information about the potential partners (Google, 2020). To this day,
however, the platform still describes itself as “accessible by invitation only” (Google, 2015a), and
it is unclear what eligibility requirements Google takes into account when reviewing partner
applications. Regardless, as more institutions have joined the initiative, what used to be a process
of collaboration and negotiation – in which cultural institutions and Google acknowledged and
therefore legitimized each other – has been replaced by a lopsided power structure in which,
23
especially for smaller institutions, simply being approved and featured on the platform has
become a factor that in itself adds value to their collections (Rodríguez-Ortega, 2018).
Despite the platform’s mission statement that focuses on “cultural institutions and artists”
and an FAQ stipulating that the platform is only “open to non-profit institutions, museums,
galleries, and archives” (Google, 2015a), GA&C now also hosts entities that are not exactly
cultural institutions, including national and local tourism agencies such as the Federal Agency for
Tourism in Russia, South African Tourism, Tour Nigeria, Quang Binh Tourism Department in
Vietnam, as well as the City of Takasaki and City of Gastronomy Niigata in Japan. These agencies
may be public or private, but they all aim to promote the local tourist industry, a commercial
endeavor, therefore contradicting the platform’s own content guidelines that it “should not be
used for any commercial activity” (Google, 2018).
The Partner tab on GA&C’s About page describes the list of tools and services it provides
for institutional partners, including digitization, collection management, online publishing, and The
Lab (Google, 2020). Digitization is implemented using Art Camera (a custom-built imaging device
that produces high-resolution images and allows advanced zoom functionality), Museum View (a
series of portable imaging stations that create Street View-style virtual tours), and traditional
tabletop scanners for two-dimensional objects. The collection management tools include a step-
by-step tutorial on item management, exhibit curation, publishing options, account management,
content translation, with a resource document titled “Connected to Culture” – published on the
2020 International Museum Day in collaboration with the International Council of Museums – that
aimed to help organizations create online cultural programs at the beginning of the pandemic
(Kobyakova, 2020). Not only are these technologies available to institutional partners on the
platform, but GA&C also promotes the adoption of these proprietary tools inside the partner
institution’s own digital infrastructure. For instance, GA&C encourages partners to use the “in-
painting tours” feature (formally named Embed), which allows users to zoom in on an object to
see extremely fine details, on their own website as an interactive displaying tool. Finally, The Lab,
first unveiled as a physical space in Google’s Paris headquarters in December 2013 (Willsher,
2013), is where the GA&C team works with engineers, artists, curators, and creative coders to
design new art experiments that increasingly use machine learning and artificial intelligence.
24
On top of the resources oered to institutional partners, I have recreated the menu
structure of the GA&C website below to demonstrate what an average user may encounter when
exploring the platform (Figure 1). This menu structure has remained stable (as of April 2024) since
the platform update in April 2020, and only the homepage includes regular changes on a daily
basis, where featured content – artworks, exhibits, and projects – is presented sometimes in
conjunction with (mostly U.S.) holidays and global events, such as Black History Month, Women’s
History Month, Valentine’s Day, Pi Day, St. Patrick’s D a y, Christmas, and the death of Queen
Elizabeth II, just to name a few. In addition to temporary content, the homepage also consistently
includes the following sections:
• Today ’s top picks: five featured stories, items, games, or videos
• Games: including puzzle, crossword, coloring, trivia, and other audiovisual projects
• Explore in high definition: artworks that allow detailed zooming
• Museum explorer: virtual tours using Street View technologies
• Discover by color: sorting and grouping collection images by color palette
The current version of the GA&C mobile app provides users with access to the same collection
content, but it also promotes a growing set of playful experiences and camera-based features
using VR, AR, and AI-enabled functions, including the (in)famous Art Selfie feature that matches a
selfie provided by the user with a portrait in the GA&C database based on (problematic) visual
similarities (Chen, 2018; Shu, 2018). I provide a detailed account of the GA&C app in Chapter 4.
It is important to note that despite the structural updates of the platform over the years,
what individual users can do on the platform has not changed significantly and is still rather
limited compared to other types of digital platforms. Users do not have to login to their Google
account to access the platform, and most content is not personalized based on either user profile
or geolocation, except for the Nearby tab that asks for a user’s device location and a small section
on the homepage “Recommended for you” showing certain artworks “Because […] is in your
favorites.” When users are not logged into their Google account, this becomes a generic message,
“Discover popular artworks and hidden gems from around the world.” Logged in users can add
individual objects, stories, projects, and collections to their “favorites” and group their favorited
items into galleries. They can share content on social media, but only six options are available:
25
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Email, Tumblr, and Google Classroom. Users can also play games,
and an Achievements tab keeps track of their progress and badges (e.g., an Adventurer badge is
granted when a user takes a virtual tour using Street View).
Both the website and the mobile app have an Experiments section that redirects users to
“Experiments with Google,” a website outside GA&C that showcases a collection of experimental
projects created by various Google teams in collaboration with dierent partners, including artists
in residence at The Lab, using Chrome, Android, AI, VR, AR, and other technologies (Google,
2014). Arts & Culture is a subsection of the website that first started in 2016. Early experiments
included Curator Ta bl e 3 and Free Fall,4 two interactive data visualization projects used by the
Director in a 2016 Ted Ta l k to promote the then new GA&C platform (TED, 2016). In contrast to
these early projects that visually epitomized the platform’s totalizing approach to arts and culture,
some of the recent experiments have taken a more playful turn to create gaming or game-like
experiences based on cultural elements, including Blob Opera (based on a machine learning
model trained on the voices of four opera singers to create opera-like vocal tunes), 3D Pottery (to
recreate the look of an original artifact), and Baguette Sprint (a 3D endless running game that
celebrates the French baguette receiving UNESCO World Heritage status in late 2022).
Summary
This section provides a brief account of the GA&C initiative’s oicial origin story, in which it
emerged as a side project for some enthusiastic employees who sought to expand the company’s
overall mission with existing technologies. The limited number of press releases and interviews
about the project failed to paint a complete picture of its early development, especially how the
scale of participation and availability of features have expanded over the years, or how the two
interchangeably used labels – Art Project and Cultural Institute – eventually converged to become
the Google Arts & Culture it is today. Although GA&C does not keep a public record of its own
development, researchers and archivists have created and maintained an extensive web archive
of how the platform’s presence on the web has changed over the years. I therefore adopt a web
3 See https://experiments.withgoogle.com/curator-table.
4 See https://experiments.withgoogle.com/free-fall.
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archival and media archaeological approach to examine this ever-expanding web archive and
seek to reconstruct a more complete timeline of GA&C’s institutional history.
This section also oers a descriptive account of the platform’s features and tools. The
recently developed Experiments are particularly worth mentioning in part because they connect
GA&C to Google’s broader eorts to create, if not exploit and monetize, new technologies. More
importantly, these experiments and their underlying technologies were made possible and
continue to improve because of the massive amounts of cultural datasets provided by GA&C’s
partner institutions. If cultural institutions are not paying for the platform, are they the product?
On the platform’s FAQ, Google claims that it “will not show ads on the website” and “will neither
directly monetize the content nor charge users a fee to access the content” (Google, 2015,
emphasis added). Then, is collecting data about cultural objects and platform users how Google
indirectly monetizes the initiative? The 2011 New York Times article mentioned earlier also
included an interview with former director of the Cultural Institute, Steve Crossan, who, stopping
short of using the word data, acknowledged that philanthropy and public relations were not the
initiative’s only goals:
There’s certainly an investment logic to this. Having good content on the Web, in open
standards, is good for the Web, is good for the users. If you invest in what’s good for the
Web and the users, that will bear fruit. (Crossan, as cited in Pfanner, 2011)
The ultimate (and ulterior) motive behind the platform, as I demonstrate in Chapter 6, is a
recurring point of tension and distrust for many institutional partners. I will return to the topics of
datafication and commercialization in a later section, but it is imperative that the investigation of
the GA&C platform challenge its purported and preferred rhetoric of access and preservation,
focusing instead on the issues of power and control. Considering the intellectual lineage of a
universally accessible catalogue of arts and culture, the risks of privatization posed by technology
companies controlling otherwise public resources, and the dominance of digital platforms as a
sociotechnical force in contemporary society, the following three sections will unpack the GA&C
platform from the perspectives of the virtual museum, digital enclosure, and platform governance.
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Figure 1. The menu structure of GA&C’s current website (as of April 2024).
Google Arts & Culture
Home
[featured sections]
Today’s top picks
Games
Explore in high definition
Museum explorer
Discover by color
Explore
Highlights
Categories
Explore by time and color
Collections
Editorial: Weekly highlights
Popular topics
Nearby
Visit
Browse
Profile
Favorites
Galleries
Achievements
Collections
All
A-Z
Map
Themes
Featured
More themes
Experiments
Artists
All
A-Z
Time
Mediums
All
A-Z
Art movements
All
A-Z
Time
Historical events
All
A-Z
Time
Historical figures
All
A-Z
Time
Places
All
A-Z
About
Settings
View activity
Send feedback
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The History of the Virtual Museum
Whether it is the stated purpose of access, preservation, and democratization, or the
unstated function of power, control, and canonization, what Google is trying to achieve in the
cultural sector through GA&C is anything but new, at least not on a conceptual level. Throughout
the twentieth century, many artists, intellectuals, and museum practitioners have envisioned and
experimented with the idea of a universally accessible virtual museum that brings museum
collections beyond the institution’s physical walls to the wider public. The expanded access was
especially predicated upon the transformation of artworks through the ages of mechanical and
digital reproduction. In this section, I trace the intellectual underpinnings and institutional
experimentations of the virtual museum, highlighting the importance of interactive media
technologies in exhibition design and the role of the audiences as active participants rather than
passive spectators. Although GA&C implements some aspects of the virtual museum and
underscores access and preservation in its mission statement, the reconceptualization of the
users as more than passive spectators has yet to be realized on the platform. This section
provides the theoretical framework and (art) historical context to understand the aspirations and
limitations of GA&C as a contemporary iteration of the virtual museum.
From Domestic Pinacotheca to the Imaginary Museum
Huhtamo (2010) historicized the virtual museum and traced its origins to the early
twentieth century, when exhibition design began to emerge as a new medium among the avant-
garde artists. The use of emerging technological media by these artists created new radical
aesthetic forms (e.g., ready-made, non-narrative film, and photomontage) that were deeply
incompatible with established cultural institutions of the time. In searching for new ways of
displaying art, Huhtamo argued that many artists sought to expose the ideological roots of the
modernist exhibition space and reconfigure the gallery to integrate new media technologies and
create “a total environment that envelops the visitors and encourages them into dynamic
relationship with the space and all its dimensions and elements” (p. 125). In this immersive new
space, artists such as El Lissitzky, Frederick Kiesler, and László Moholy-Nagy deployed dierent
strategies to encourage visitors to move around inside the gallery space and interact with the
exhibits. Although dismissed by some critics as “penny arcade without the pennies,” these radical
29
exhibition practices anticipated a culture of interactivity that used technology “against collective
consumption typical of mass media and for individualized and customized experiences” (p. 127,
emphasis in original). For Huhtamo, the reconfiguration of the gallery as a navigable non-linear
database, the convergence of dierent media, and the visitor’s interactive relationship with the
exhibits all paved the way for the future virtual museum.
In addition to the integration of media technologies in the gallery space, Huhtamo
suggested that the same artists and designers also attempted to facilitate the domestic
consumption of art. In particular, Huhtamo noted the increased visuality of the domestic interior
as an essential feature of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, citing the filing cabinet for
stereoscopic photographs as the archetypical “database furniture” designed for armchair
travelling, with hundreds of images “retrieved from the logically arranged databank only when
needed” (pp. 129-130). For Huhtamo, the increased domestic visuality in the early twentieth
century was the sociocultural background in which Moholy-Nagy envisioned his pinacotheca in
1925, which inspired Kiesler’s conception of the Telemuseum in 1926, a home space with “walls
for sensitized panels that would act as receiving surfaces for broadcasted pictures” as well as
“built-in shrines for original masterpieces that will be concealed behind walls and revealed
occasionally” (Kiesler, 1930, as cited in Huhtamo, 2010, p. 129). All in all, Huhtamo argued that
these avant-garde experiments, along with other lesser-known eorts, to introduce interactive art
experiences to the home space since the 1920s have long envisioned the contours and
characteristics of the virtual museum.
Whether it is Moholy-Nagy’s pinacotheca or Kiesler’s Telemuseum, these new
configurations for art consumption are predicated upon the reproducibility of the original
artworks. Walter Benjamin’s (1936/2019) seminal essay discussed the aesthetic, social, and
political implications of art being mass reproduced through mechanical means. What he did not
discuss was how the museum would be implicated in this process. In his three-part volume
originally published in 1951, André Malraux (1974) conceived his “museums without wall” (or
“imaginary museums” as translated from the French title le musée imaginaire) and discussed
how photographic reproduction had changed both the role of the museum and the way the public
engages with reproduced artworks outside the museum space:
30
[…] in our Museum without Walls, picture, fresco, miniature and stained-glass window
seem of one and the same family. For all alike […] have become “colorplates.” In the
process they have lost their properties as objects; but, by the same token, they have
gained something: the utmost significance as to style that they can possibly acquire.
(Malraux, 1953/1974, p. 44, emphasis in original)
Malraux’s central argument, echoing and expanding on Benjamin’s idea, is that the process of
photographic reproduction deprived objects of their specificity and scale but conferred upon
them a common style, a “specious unity” that renders otherwise unconnected objects related
when they are reproduced on the same page, allowing new relationships between artworks to be
established. The photo album, as Malraux put it, “isolates both to metamorphose […] and for
discovery” (p. 16).
The imposition of a common style and the resulting discovery of new relationships
between artworks is what connects the imaginary museum and the virtual museum. For instance,
Battro (2010) considered the various forms of virtual museums emerging in the 1990s as “the
product of the prodigious evolution” of Malraux’s imaginary museum, focusing particularly on their
common capacity for serendipitous discovery (p. 137). Just as the imaginary museum transcends
the confines of the museum walls, “the virtual museum has ceased to be a simple reflection of
the real one; it has developed a life of its own, no longer satisfied with informing and exhibiting but
challenging to action and discovery” (p. 146).
Implementing the Virtual Museum
While avant-garde artists and scholars had established the intellectual foundation for
envisioning the virtual museum, it was not until the 1960s when the invention of hypertext finally
paved the way for museums to build non-linear data architectures for information management.
The use of hypertext for the purpose of information organization was rooted in pioneering ideas
such as Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu in 1960, Vannevar Bush’s hypothetical device Memex in
1945, as well as the Mundaneum as the “city of knowledge” conceived by Paul Otlet and Henri La
Fontaine in the early twentieth century (Huhtamo, 2010; Schweibenz, 2019; Perkowitz, 2016).
Hypertext-based application programs such as HyperCard allowed the museum to organize and
cross-reference collection information in a non-linear fashion and provided museum
professionals with access to massive multimedia files with a user-friendly interface (Schweibenz,
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2019). As for public access, Huhtamo (2010) mentioned two exhibitions organized by the
Japanese telecom company NTT’s InterCommunication Center, “The Museum Inside the
Telephone Network” in 1991 and “The Museum Inside the Network” in 1995, which allowed users
to access the exhibition at home using telephone, fax, and the Internet.
In the early 1990s, stand-alone information kiosks and CD-ROM-based virtual museums
became increasingly popular. One of the earliest virtual museum applications was Micro Gallery,
introduced at the National Gallery in London in 1991 and later adopted by the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C., which allowed visitors to browse individual objects and print a
personalized tour guide (Rubinstein, 1992; Ziska, 1999). Huhtamo (2010) also described some of
the earliest CD-ROM-based virtual museum applications, including Apple’s “Virtual Museum”
presented at a computer graphics conference in 1992, demonstrating its Quick Time VR software
that allowed users to explore 3D simulations of interactive museum spaces. Importantly,
Huhtamo noted that these early commercial CD-ROM products deliberately limited their scope
and rarely attempted to recreate (and therefore substitute for a visit to) the actual museum space.
Rather, they served as promotional supplements often sold as souvenirs in museum shops or
bookstores and “did little to question the legitimacy of the traditional museum institution” (p.
122). Eventually, as the emergence of the Internet allowed museums to build their own websites
that fulfil the same informational and promotional functions with more eiciency and fewer
limitations, these CD-ROM experiments, along with the medium itself, gradually became obsolete
(Bearman & Trant, 2018).
Computerization and networked communications first became available for the museum
community on a smaller scale in the 1960s, but the systems were expensive to build and
maintain, limited to text files only, and therefore primarily served institutional functions rather
than public needs (Parry, 2007; Williams, 2010; Navarrete, 2014; Marty, 2018). Bearman and
Trant (2018) oered a comprehensive account of how museums began to experiment with the
Web in the 1990s, including online exhibitions that accompanied on-site shows (e.g., the
Smithsonian Institution and MoMA), virtual experiences such as 3D models of artifacts and tours
of the museum space (e.g., University of California Museum of Paleontology), community
outreach events such as livestreaming (e.g., Exploratorium), social tagging (e.g., Powerhouse
32
Museum), volunteer cataloging (e.g., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco), and serious games
(e.g., Science Museum of London). Overall, the museum community’s early experiments with the
web were “programmatically driven, emphasizing exhibitions and events, rather than collections
databases and privileging browsing over site-searching” (p. 3222). Museum websites, like CD-
ROM-based virtual museums and Web 1.0 technologies in general, cultivated a cyclical
relationship with the museums and were intended to complement rather than replace visits to the
physical museum (Marty, 2007). In addition to these institutional eorts that sought to establish a
virtual extension of the physical museum, individual enthusiasts also created many prototypical
virtual museum projects featuring images from multiple collections, such as WebLouvre (created
by French student Nicolas Pioch in 1994 and later renamed as WebMuseum as per the request of
the Louvre Museum) and Artchive (created by virtual curator Mark Harden in 1998 as a mix of
collection images and art history resources).
Schweibenz (2019) described how the term “virtual museum” came to be established in
the museum studies discourse through conference presentations and publications since the
1990s. Because of the term’s eclectic disciplinary origins, however, there was never a commonly
accepted definition. Instead, the meaning of the term virtual museum “remains under practical
construction” (Besser et al., 2004, p. 21, as cited in Schweibenz, 2019), and it referred to “almost
any kind of collection of material (supposedly of ‘historical’ or at least ‘cultural’ value) put on
general display on the Internet” (Huhtamo, 2010, p. 121). The phrase gained some oicial
recognition in 1996 when Britannica Online added a reference entry for virtual museum, defined
(still in 2024) as:
[…] a collection of digitally recorded images, sound files, text documents, and other data
of historical, scientific, or cultural interest that are accessed through electronic media. A
virtual museum does not house actual objects and therefore lacks the permanence and
unique qualities of a museum in the institutional definition of the term. (Britannica, 2017)
Andrews and Schweibenz (1998) provided a similar but more nuanced working definition:
[…] the virtual museum is a logically related collection of elements composed in a variety
of media, and, because of its capacity to provide connectedness and various points of
access, lends itself to transcending traditional methods of communicating with the user; it
has no real place or space, and dissemination of its contents is theoretically unbounded.
(p. 24)
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Schweibenz (2004) unpacked this definition and identified dierent types of virtual
museums emerging in the early 2000s, including brochure museum with a museum’s basic
information, content museum presenting a museum’s collections online, learning museum that
focused on contexts instead of objects and provided additional educational resources, and finally
virtual museum that not only showcased a museum’s digital collections but also linked to the
collections of other institutions. While this typology seems to present a steady progression of the
various forms of the virtual museum, Bearman and Trant (2018) argued that the virtual museum
did not evolve in a linear fashion, but rather started as a highly experimental space featuring both
online exhibitions and educational interactives, and only added basic brochure information later
when the Internet became more readily available among the public.
GA&C as Virtual Museum
To some extent, GA&C is a combination of Schweibenz’s brochure museum, content
museum, learning museum, and virtual museum all at once. Like Malraux’s imaginary museum,
GA&C also produces a similar stylistic unity that, thanks in part to the uniform design language
and interface architecture, connects otherwise unrelated objects and therefore allows new
relationships between artworks to be established. This is especially the case with interactive
experiments. For example, Curator Table and Free Fall (see footnotes 3 and 4) demonstrate this
logic by depriving the digital objects of their scale and specificity and presenting them in a
totalizing fashion. Another experiment launched in 2016, X Degrees of Separation,5 pushed this
logic even further and literalized the imaginary museum’s capacity for serendipitous discovery.
This experiment uses machine learning algorithms to create a visual pathway between two works
chosen by the user through a chain of visually similar images (Figure 2). The description of the
experiment sounds eerily familiar to the promises of Malraux’s imaginary museum:
This network of connected artworks allows X Degrees of Separation to take us on the
scenic route where serendipity is waiting at every step: surprising connections, masterful
works by unknown artists or the hidden beauty of mundane objects. (Klingemann & Doury,
2016)
5 See https://experiments.withgoogle.com/x-degrees-of-separation.
34
Figure 2. The result page of X Degrees of Separation.6
In the meantime, the definitions of the virtual museum, the museum sector’s experiments
with the Web in the 1990s, and even the exhibition design philosophy of the avant-garde artists all
foregrounded the use of interactive media technologies and the role of the audiences as active
participants instead of passive spectators. Ho w e ver, other than consuming cultural content in the
form of objects, stories, and exhibits, the types of activities GA&C aords its users are limited to
adding to favorites, sharing to social media, and playing interactive games. Valtýsson (2020)
commented on this limited user maneuverability and the broad cultural politics of participation on
GA&C, arguing that it falls short of the promises of the participatory culture mobilizing user-
generated content, exemplified by concepts such as creative audience and users-turned-
producers (Castells, 2009), interactive audience (Jenkins, 2006), produsers (Bruns, 2008), and
productive enthusiasts (Gauntlett, 2011). Instead of transitioning to a read-write and making-and-
doing culture that encourages and supports the active participation of the users, the GA&C
platform, Valtýsson argued, is still perpetuating the read-only and sit-back-and-be-told culture
(Lessig, 2008; Gauntlett, 2011) that imagines users as primarily passive spectators. On the GA&C
mobile app, this read-only form of cultural consumption doubles down on the logic of passivity by
6 Unless otherwise stated, all screenshots in the dissertation were captured on July 29 of 2024.
35
fully adopting the social media format of infinite scrolling, turning the promised serendipitous
discovery into yet another avenue of endlessly streaming culture (Arditi, 2021).
It is important to recognize that GA&C always has elements of interactivity built into the
platform, and with the introduction of games in recent years, it may have literally become an art-
based “penny arcade without the pennies.” However, user participation in the sense of creative
remix championed by scholars mentioned above should not be equated with, or reduced to, mere
interactivity facilitated by the use of digital technologies. Responding to the buzz of interactive
media art in the 1990s, Sarkis (1993) critiqued the promotional rhetoric surrounding interactivity,
arguing that it created an illusion of engagement when the users were simply responding to pre-
programmed scenarios, thus perpetuating a passive mode of interaction, or what Sarkis termed
“interpassivity.” Furthermore, Witcomb (2006) cautioned against the confusion of interactivity as
a pedagogical ideal with the mere equipment of interactives in the exhibition space, advocating
instead an understanding of interactivity that foregrounds the process of dialogue. Finally, from a
sociopolitical perspective, Barry (1998) attributed the obsession with interactivity in the museum
space to the neoliberal reimagination of the citizen as an actively self-governing agent capable of
individual choice and market-driven participation. For Barry, interactivity disguised as such often
reinforced consumerist behaviors in the cultural sector while promoting a superficial sense of
agency rather than fostering genuine democratic participation. This kind of rhetorical slippage that
reduces dialogue-based engagement to technologically enabled interactivity, often through the
increasing gamification on GA&C, is discussed in Chapter 5.
Summary
This section traces the intellectual origin and institutional history of the virtual museum.
Both avant-garde artists in the 1920s and museum practitioners in the 1990s strove to use new
media technologies to expand access to museum collections beyond the institutional walls and
communicate with the wider public in their home space. From the reconfiguration of the gallery
space as a navigable database, the convergence of multiple media, to the user’s interactive
relationship with the exhibits, these practices not only envision the historical contours of the
virtual museum throughout the twentieth century but also provide the theoretical framework and
historical context to understand the aspirations and limitations of GA&C as a contemporary
36
incarnation of the virtual museum. As a private initiative, however, GA&C’s intellectual lineage is
often overshadowed by the role it plays in the privatization of the cultural sector. The next section
focuses on the rise of networked memory institutions, especially how they have facilitated the
processes of digital convergence, datafication, and ultimately the digital enclosure of the cultural
commons.
From Digital Convergence to Digital Enclosure
Despite the grand vision of avant-garde artists in the 1920s and the novel experiments of
museum practitioners in the 1990s, the capacity for serendipitous discovery enabled by digital
platforms such as GA&C ultimately depends on the continuing collection of data, both from
individual users and institutional partners, in exchange for its “free” services. In the meantime,
even the most fervent advocates of the participatory culture have come to acknowledge the
exploitive nature of how platforms engage with the users (Jenkins, 2009), a process similarly
based on the generation, collection, and monetization of massive behavioral data. In other words,
the rhetoric of democratizing access in GA&C’s mission statements belies the invisible yet
incessant processes of datafication, a broader economic and ideological trend that encloses
traditional memory institutions inside new forms of economic relationships and cultural
infrastructures controlled by powerful corporations. In this section, I interrogate the privatization
of the cultural sector through the notion of networked memory institutions, beginning with the
institutional background of digital convergence and then focusing on the corporate enclosure of
the digital commons as well as the issue of datafication.
Digital Convergence in Memory Institutions
The definitions of the virtual museum outlined in the previous section emphasize the
absence of object materiality and institutional permanence. However, other museum scholars
have attempted to reconcile the digital and the virtual with the material and the real. Müller (2002)
considered the dichotomy between real and virtual to be misleading, oversimplifying the
multiplicity of meanings bestowed upon objects. Insofar as artifacts tell a story within the
curatorial and architectural framework of the museum display, virtuality remains a “fundamental
exhibiting practice” that oers another frame of reference that contextualizes objects through
37
narratives and connections (p. 21). Similarly, Parry (2007) underlined the museum’s informational
nature and coined the term e-tangible to characterize objects that are created, altered, and
managed through the intervention of a computer. For Parry, museums have always performed the
functions of computers, and the notions of digitality and virtuality only served to synchronize with
“existing curatorial discourses that had valued information, liminality and mimesis” (p. 81).
Likewise, Geismar (2018) proposed an alternative trajectory of materiality that reconciles the
digital with the analogue, information with material, and knowledge with form, considering the
digital to simply be “the latest in a string of interpretive and imaging technologies devised to copy,
distribute and presence [sic] collections” (p. 106). Pushing the conceptual boundaries even
further, Dziekan and Proctor (2019) invoked the concept of the post-digital to suggest the
convergence between spatial practices and digital mediation, in which digitality has become a
normative condition of human existence (see also Parry, 2013).
While these scholars considered the ontological and philosophical implications of
digitality on museum objects, memory institutions at large, along with the social functions they
fulfill, have also undergone significant changes because of new powerful entities in the digital
realm. Pessach (2008) defined memory institutions as “social entities that select, document,
contextualize, preserve, index, and thus canonize elements of humanity’s culture, historical
narratives, individual, and collective memories” (p. 73). Considering LAM institutions (libraries,
archives, and museums) as paradigmatic examples of traditional memory institutions, Pessach
observed that new types of collaborative platforms for the production and distribution of cultural
works (e.g., content-sharing infrastructures, social networking sites, digital images agencies, and
online music stores) perform a “derivative ancillary function of […] constructing and preserving
cultural representations of social remembering” and thus serve a de facto function as networked
memory institutions (p. 106). For Pessach (writing before the launch of GA&C), prominent
examples of networked memory institutions included Getty Images (a commercial supplier of
stock photographs, videos, and music), iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody (a music streaming
service that later became Napster), and the Google Books project. As media companies became
increasingly involved in collective social remembering, “[t]he power to remember, as well as the
38
power to forget, are thus gradually being concentrated in clusters of commercial enterprises with
very particular interests, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences” (p. 74).
Not only does the term networked memory institution foreground the convergence
between spatial practices (i.e., museums) and digital mediation (i.e., platforms), but it also signals
the functional and organizational integration – a digital convergence – between dierent types of
memory institutions in the past three decades. Rayward (1998) argued that the emergence of an
electronic information system would “require a major redefinition and integration of the role of
archives, museums and research libraries” (p. 207). Likewise, Schweibenz (2004) argued that the
trends of digitization and increased public access would “blur the dierences between cultural
heritage institutions, and in the long run these institutions will merge into one memory institution”
(p. 3). For those working in the cultural sector, Marty (2014) emphasized the importance for
“cultural heritage information professionals to transcend the traditional boundaries between
libraries, archives, and museums to meet information needs in the digital age” (p. 613). More
recently, Hvenegaard Rasmussen et al. (2022) discussed a similar convergence among LAM
institutions in the Scandinavian context, highlighting their common intellectual ancestry, cultural
policy goals, new user-driven institutional missions, structural proximity inside the government
administration, collaboration across dierent LAM institutions, and shared cultural imperatives
and professional practices. However, focusing on Australia and New Zealand, Robinson (2018)
cautioned against the danger of administrative convergence in museums at the expense of
eective interpretive practices, which may end up limiting public access to the museum
collection. Regardless of the benefits or dangers, the overall trend of digital convergence among
cultural institutions serves as the backdrop against which dierent types of memory institutions
began to use or collaborate with digital platforms.
Enclosure of the Cultural Commons
Against the institutional backdrop of digital convergence, many traditional memory
institutions have increasingly integrated their operations with private platform companies (i.e.,
networked memory institutions) actively involved in the cultural sector. As a consequence, civic
and political institutions have partly relegated the role of constructing and preserving cultural
39
memories to commercial forces, with powerful corporations now relentlessly pursuing the
privatization of otherwise public cultural resources.
Pessach (2008) argued that the transformation from preserving tangible cultural artifacts
to distributing digital cultural information has resulted in a gradual privatization of traditional
memory institutions. In this process, copyright laws play an instrumental role, especially in the
U.S., by commodifying the inputs and outputs of networked memory institutions, “transforming
the cultural DNA” of traditional memory institutions,” and making them more inclined to adopt
“proprietary restrictive policies toward third parties” (p. 97). For Pessach, this transformation is
achieved through the combination of coercion and evolution: coercion refers to the prevalence of
intellectual property laws, contractual obligations, and technological protection measures (e.g.,
licensing agreements, terms of service, and digital rights management measures) that memory
institutions are compelled to follow in networked domains; evolution refers to the fact that
copyright laws incentivize traditional memory institutions to voluntarily implement proprietary
practices, creating new evolutionary dynamics that make public-oriented institutions behave like
commercial entities. As a result, networked memory institutions have created or leveraged
external legal pressures and internal operational dynamics that facilitate the gradual privatization
of traditional memory institutions.
Regarding these evolutionary dynamics, Pessach discussed several examples, including
Smithsonian Networks (a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and a commercial
cable company to develop television programming using the Smithsonian’s collections), ARTstor
(a non-profit initiative that provides digital images for educational and scholarly use), and again,
the Google Books project. According to Pessach, what these initiatives had in common was the
adoption of proprietary practices on the part of public institutions, imposed and enforced by their
commercial partners. For example, the Smithsonian was obliged to limit access to its collections
by other film creators interested in using these materials; Google’s library partners must prevent
users from downloading the digitized books and other search engines from automatedly scanning
these digitized copies; and by limiting the use of its image collections exclusively to non-profit
institutional users, ARTstor was “a paradigmatic example for a public-oriented not-for-profit
40
institution that implements licensing schemes and technological protection measures as part of
its networked presence” (p. 103).
If the privatization of memory institutions signals a shift from political and civic spheres to
commercial forces in the construction of cultural memories, it also underscores the peril inflicted
on the cultural commons by corporate forces relentlessly attempting to enclose a growing share
of supposedly public resources. Historically, the commons referred to communal fields and
arable lands that, starting in twelfth-century England, gradually became consolidated into
privately owned farm properties through the process of enclosure (Wordie, 1983). Scholarly
interest in the commons saw an increase since the 1980s, especially following Ostrom’s (1990)
seminal work refuting Hardin’s (1968) essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” demonstrating that
properly governed commons can function as economic institutions that provide sustainable and
eective alternatives to market-centered and state-oriented approaches to manage natural and
cultural resources. In the mid-1990s, the rise of the Internet created new virtual communities and
online communications in cyberspace, and the commons as a conceptual framework helped
legal, economic, and information scholars (e.g., Boyle, 2008; Lessig, 2001) make sense of newly
developed social dilemmas, as new technologies gradually captured and enclosed resources that
were previously unowned and unprotected (Hess & Ostrom, 2007). Bollier and Helfrich (2012)
elevated the idea of commons to something akin to a political ideology beyond the symbiotic
duopoly of market and state, as “a paradigm that embodies its own logic and patterns of behavior,
functioning as a dierent kind of operating system for society” (p. 2).
Derived from this academic discourse were new concepts such as information commons,
knowledge commons, digital commons, and cultural commons (Christen, 2012), conceived in
dierent contexts but all intended to address what Boyle (2003) considered to be the second
enclosure movement targeting “the intangible commons of the mind” (p. 37). Recently, Dulong de
Rosnay and Stalder (2020) defined digital commons as holistic social institutions that govern the
(re)production of data, information, culture, and knowledge as shared resources, and highlighted
the role of cultural institutions in preserving, digitizing, and disseminating public domain works
without imposing excessive legal, economic, or technical restrictions to public access and reuse.
Scholars examining the Google Books project have made explicit references to the erosion of the
41
information commons by the company’s proposed proprietary digital library regime. On top of
copyright infringement and anti-competitive practices that eventually doomed the project,
Vaidhyanathan (2011) argued that participating libraries prioritized expediency over concerns of
image quality, user confidentiality, metadata standards, and long-term preservation, and were
therefore “complicit in centralizing and commercializing access to knowledge under a single
corporate umbrella” (p. 164). Similarly, Pélissier (2021) examined the emerging cultural heritage
commons economy against “the force of capitalism’s vague ‘proprietarist’ tendencies” (p. xii),
regarding Google Books and the ensuing legal settlement as a prime example of “the intrusion and
domination of private companies in a sector hitherto reserved for non-market cultural institutions”
(p. 150). Based on Ostrom’s previous work, Pélissier considered the cultural heritage commons to
be a manifestation of the knowledge commons, whose social value depends on its dissemination
among and use by the public, and it should follow such principles as “shared ownership of
cultural resources, social value generated by voluntary contributors, and governance oriented
towards the continuous enrichment of cultural resources” (p. 196).
However, this commons-based approach to digital cultural heritage is far from the reality.
Building on the work of Boyle (2003), Benkler (2006), and Schiller (2007) that interrogated
corporate strategies that construct a restrictive legal regime to control, privatize, and commodify
previously non-proprietary information, Andrejevic (2007) proposed the term digital enclosure to
conceptualize new forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity. The
resulting interactive enclosure is “fantastically productive in terms of its ability to generate,
capture, and store personal information” (p. 298) and “facilitates control over resources so as to
structure the terms of access” (p. 307).
Ultimately, the enclosure of the cultural commons, just like the historical land enclosure,
is about extracting and transfiguring aspects of human life, whether it is arable lands, personal
behaviors, or cultural collections, into elements used for the creation of economic value.
Underlying the dialectics of digital commons and digital enclosure is the process of datafication,
the transformation of hitherto unquantified human actions and social phenomena into quantified
formats in order to be tabulated and analyzed (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; van Dijck,
2014; Mejias & Couldry, 2019; Zubo, 2019). Not only is datafication a discernable economic
42
process, but as van Dijck (2014) noted, it also represents an ideological dimension, a form of
dataism beneath the normalization of datafication as a new paradigm that betrays “a widespread
belief in the objective quantification and potential tracking of all kinds of human behavior and
sociality” and “trust in the (institutional) agents that collect, interpret, and share (meta)data” (p.
198, emphasis in original). The analytical value of the term thus lies in its ability to “name the
processes and the frameworks by which a new form of extractivism is unfolding in our times,”
especially the processes of value generation and the external infrastructures for collecting,
processing, and storing data (Mejias & Couldry, 2019, p. 7).
GA&C as Networked Memory Institution
Exploiting networked communication technologies (like media companies operating in
commercial markets) as well as fulfilling the roles of selection, preservation, and canonization
(like the cultural institutions hosted on its platform), GA&C is a paradigmatic networked memory
institution, providing institutional partners with proprietary technologies and tools that tend to
restrict access to cultural content that may otherwise be freely available to the public. For
instance, when GA&C encourages partners to use the Embed feature (i.e., in-painting tours) on
their own website as an interactive displaying tool, it in eect replaces a downloadable image file
in a widely accessible format on a web page with a piece of the company’s proprietary technology
that restrictively aords its users nothing but passive viewing and zooming. This is precisely the
kind of evolutionary dynamics that, as Pessach argued, incentivize public memory institutions to
voluntarily adopt proprietary practices and in so doing transforming their cultural DNA to behave
more like commercial entities.
Capturing this symbiotic relationship between access and control, Wilson-Barnao (2017)
applied Andrejevic’s notion of digital enclosure in the museum context, arguing that, despite the
rhetoric of access promoted by Google, the GA&C platform has transformed the museum from a
community space to an advertising resource, bridging “a commercial enclosure with the cultural
collections of public institutions, enclosing those institutions within the architecture of networked
capitalism” (p. 562). As a result, “the historical, aesthetic and pedagogical attributes of the
objects are regarded as less important than stimulating forms of engagement that generate
attention and data online that shape users’ attention” (p. 569). Despite this critical commentary
43
on the invisible process of digital enclosure, Wilson-Barnao considered the platform’s visible
infrastructure to be “appealingly neutral” and suggested that “Google seems not to express any
authority over the environment” (p. 567). On the contrary, I argue that even “appealingly neutral”
digital interfaces are normative statements embedded with social logics and cultural norms –
about the platform’s intended use and the idealized user profile – and are therefore an important
part of the digital enclosure process. I will elaborate on the normative nature of digital interfaces
in the next section.
Summary
This section examines the rise of networked memory institutions against the background
of digital convergence among traditional memory institutions. Controlled by powerful actors in the
private sector, these networked memory institutions have leveraged external legal pressures and
induced internal operational dynamics that bring about the privatization and commodification of
previously non-proprietary cultural information. These new forms of digital enclosure center on
the process of datafication, transforming commons-based cultural resources into elements used
for the generation of economic value. This is the sociopolitical backdrop that contextualizes and is
in turn reinforced by the emergence of private platform such as GA&C. The next section focuses
on the wide array of governance mechanisms, from interface design to infrastructural services,
employed by digital platforms to exert invisible control while appearing to be “appealingly neutral.”
Platforms and Digital Cultural Heritage
The previous two sections examined how GA&C implements some aspects of the virtual
museum ideal but falls short of achieving its full participatory potential, as well as how this
networked memory institution seeks to privatize and enclose the cultural commons through the
process of datafication. Underlying both processes is the rise of the platform as a form of
sociotechnical power, realized and reinforced through dierent governance mechanisms
including interface architecture, terms of service, and the distribution of boundary resources. This
section focuses on the issue of platform governance as the process of platformization unfolds in
the cultural sector in order to interrogate how GA&C facilitates new forms of platform-dependent
content creation that restructure the partner institution’s own organizational practices.
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The Rise of the Platform
The concept of platform has an eclectic intellectual origin. From a historical and political
economic perspective, Srnicek (2017) associated the rise of the data-centric form of advanced
capitalism – what he called platform capitalism – with the decline of the manufacturing industries
since the 1970s, which paved the way for the platform to emerge as a new business model better
equipped to extract and monetize data. In economics and business studies, Rochet and Tirole
(2003) presented a model of platform competition in two- or multi-sided markets with strong
network externalities. These markets are multi-sided because they mediate the transactions
between two or more groups, and network externalities are commonly referred to as network
eects whereby a platform becomes more valuable as the number of users increases. Social
media platforms are prototypical multi-sided markets as they facilitate the interaction between
users, advertisers, content creators, and sometimes third-party developers. From a software
studies perspective, Andreessen (2007) considered the use of the term around mid-2000s as “a
swirling vortex of confusion” and asserted, “whenever anyone uses the word ‘platform,’ ask: ‘Can
it be programmed?’ […] If not, it’s not a platform.” Similarly, Baldwin and Woodard (2009)
proposed an architecture of platforms that centers on the notion of modularity. Bogost and
Montfort (2009) addressed some of the common misconceptions about what they called
platform studies, which “may emphasize dierent technical or cultural aspects and draw on
dierent critical and theoretical approaches, but they will be united in being technically rigorous
and in deeply investigating computing systems in their interactions with creativity, expression, and
culture.”
Commenting on how YouTube adopted the term platform – instead of website, company,
service, forum, or community – to characterize itself in several press releases in 2007, Gillespie
(2010) provided a comprehensive analysis of the term’s semantic richness:
This more conceptual use of “platform” leans on all of the term’s connotations:
computational, something to build upon and innovate from; political, a place from which
to speak and be heard; figurative, in that the opportunity is an abstract promise as much
as a practical one; and architectural, in that YouTube is designed as an open-armed,
egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical
restrictions. (p. 352, emphasis added)
45
Not only do these four connotations constitute the politics of platforms, but Gillespie also argued
that adopting the term platform was an act of discursive positioning on the part of content
intermediaries to tap into the rhetoric of democratization and the enthusiasm for user-generated
content, to evade the tensions among dierent constituencies, and to minimize legal liability for
what users distribute on the platform in the eyes of the regulators.
For Gillespie, this discursive work was facilitated by the uptake of the term both in the
industry and in common parlance, where, thanks to public figures such as Tim O’Reilly (2005), it
became detached from the strict computational meaning. Later, Gillespie (2017) revisited the
platform metaphor, “which lent social media services a particular form, highlighted certain
features, naturalized certain presumed relations, and set expectations for their use, impact, and
responsibility.” Importantly, Gillespie highlighted what the metaphor seeks to hide: platforms are
intricate and multi-layered structures, inhabited by diverse and sometimes contentious
communities, equipped with complex content moderation, and necessitating a massive yet
invisible labor force to operate and maintain. Regarding these invisible aspects, Gillespie (2018)
oered a book-length treatment of the topic, arguing that content moderation “is not an ancillary
aspect of what platforms do. It is essential, constitutional, definitional” (p. 21).
Since the mid-2010s, the platform as a media concept and a business model has
extended beyond the provision of networked sociality to broker the transaction of news, housing,
transport, gaming, labor, and more, all in the name of sharing or gig economy. Srnicek (2017)
discussed several dierent types of platform companies, including advertising platform (e.g.,
Google and Facebook), cloud platform (e.g., Amazon Web Services as a cloud computing
service), industrial platform (e.g., GE and Siemens as traditional manufacturers), product platform
(e.g., Zipcar and Spotify as subscription-based and goods-as-a-service platforms), and lean
platform (e.g., Airbnb and Uber as outsourcing-dependent and “assetless” platforms). These
categories present a useful typology but are by no means exhaustive or mutually exclusive.
Specifically related to cultural institutions, Roued-Cunlie et al. (2022) identified three types of
platforms used for digital communication purposes: internal platforms, typically developed in-
house or for a specific institution (e.g., a museum website), external platforms (e.g., social media
platforms or content-sharing sites such as Flickr and Wikipedia), and cross-institutional
46
platforms designed for cultural institutions (e.g., Europeana or national initiatives created for the
cultural sector).
While recognizing the diverse disciplinary origins and practical applications of the term,
scholars in media and communication studies have reached some common ground on the
conceptual definition of and analytical approach to the platform as a social phenomenon. For
example, van Dijck (2013) acknowledged the four semantic connotations mentioned by Gillespie
(2010), considered platforms as techno-cultural and socioeconomic constructs, analyzed five
platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia – and highlighted the algorithmic
basis of platformed sociality increasingly supported by vertical integration and scalable
interoperability. Later, van Dijck et al. (2018) proposed an anatomy of the platform:
a platform is fueled by data, automated and organized through algorithms and interfaces,
formalized through ownership relations driven by business models, and governed through
user agreements. (p. 9, emphasis in original)
This anatomy provides the theoretical and methodological foundation of what the authors
called platform society, a society in which “social and economic traic is increasingly channeled
by an (overwhelmingly corporate) global online platform ecosystem that is driven by algorithms
and fueled by data” (p. 4). This (western) platform ecosystem consists of core infrastructural
services operated by U.S.-based technology companies and an array of sectoral platforms that
seamlessly integrate with the infrastructural core, governed by three primary mechanisms,
including datafication, commodification, and selection. I have explained the processes of
datafication, commodification, and privatization in the previous section. The mechanism of
selection is similar to that of content curation, but the authors emphasized a mutual shaping
between users and content, namely, “the ability of platforms to trigger and filter user activity
through interfaces and algorithms, while users, through their interaction with these coded
environments, influence the online visibility and availability of particular content, services, and
people” (pp. 40-41).
Taking into account how the term has been used in software studies, business studies and
economics, critical political economy, and cultural studies, Poell et al. (2019) defined platforms
as “(re-)programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalized interactions
47
among end-users and complementors, organized through the systematic collection, algorithmic
processing, monetization, and circulation of data” (p. 3). In this definition, complementors refer to
“the independent providers of complementary products to mutual customers” (McIntyre &
Srinivasan, 2017, p. 143), which often include content creators, intermediaries, and advertisers (I
will discuss cultural institutions as platform complementors in a later section). Furthermore, Poell
et al. (2019) also defined platformization as “the penetration of the infrastructures, economic
processes, and governmental frameworks of platforms in dierent economic sectors and spheres
of life,” and “the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around platforms” (pp. 5-6;
see also Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Poell et al., 2022; Helmond, 2015). Similar to platform capitalism
and platform society, the concept of platformization captures the outsized power of the platform
as a technological, economic, and cultural phenomenon, rendering all aspects of contemporary
social life increasingly precarious and contingent on its interface architectures and infrastructural
operations.
Platform Governance: From Infrastructure to Interface
Whether it is platform capitalism, platform society, or platformization as a process of
social and cultural transformation, the dominant power of the platform is realized and reinforced
through various governance mechanisms. Platform scholars mentioned above all emphasize the
“leanness” of digital platforms in that they typically do not own the products or services provided
on the platform. Instead, they position themselves as intermediaries and provide tools and
resources for complementors (and sometimes end-users) to create and publish their own
content. The focus on the social, material, and political dimensions of infrastructures has led
Plantin and Punathambekar (2019) to note an emerging infrastructural turn in media and
communication studies, influenced by both science and technology studies and cultural
anthropology. As platforms acquire the characteristics of infrastructures, Plantin et al. (2018)
argued that infrastructures also begin to be built or reorganized on the logic of platforms, leading
to the convergence between what they called the infrastructuralization of platforms and the
platformization of infrastructures.
This is the broader disciplinary background in which Poell et al. (2022) borrowed the term
boundary resources from software development (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013) to describe
48
the tools and resources that platforms oer to their complementors and end-users. Defined as “a
platform’s infrastructural gateways and associated informational resources that enable and
control the computational and institutional interactions with complementors” (Poell et al., 2022,
p. 66), these boundary resources may include Software Development Kits (SDKs), Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs), documentations, programming languages, community guidelines,
and terms of service. Using the game industry, podcast, music and book publishing, social media
entertainment, and journalism as case studies, Poell et al. (2022) demonstrated how boundary
resources “delineate platform boundaries by codifying and standardizing infrastructural access
and integration” and “provide platform companies with decisive mechanisms to govern
transactions and interactions” (p. 67). As the platform’s infrastructural services “partly replace
the legacy infrastructures of the cultural industries and partly replace public or commons-based
infrastructures” (p. 75), the result is the formalization of platform-dependent cultural production.
While infrastructural services such as SDKs and APIs are specialized resources that only
developers may encounter, terms of service and community guidelines are more commonly used
and (mis)understood means of platform governance that aect every platform user, regardless of
whether they have read the texts or simply checked a box willy-nilly. Tan (2018) examined how
the terms of service may shed light on the regulation of content generation by social media users
from a copyright perspective. Following a thorough analysis of the terms of service of five major
platforms – Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia – Tan argued that the
inconsistencies between the terms of service and the copyright regimes may “compromise the
eectiveness of [copyright] laws in regulating the content-generative behaviors of social media
users” (p. 99). Gillespie (2018) highlighted the dierences between terms of service, a legally
binding agreement aimed at “indemnifying the company as broadly as possible against any
liability for users’ actions,” and community guidelines, typically written in “deliberately
plainspoken language [that] lays out the platform’s expectations of what is appropriate and what
is not” (p. 46). Gillespie considered community guidelines to be discursive performances,
intended primarily as a gesture rather than for arbitration, making legible “the anxieties and
assumptions of the platform providers, and the challenges they face as they find themselves
becoming curators of (often contentious) public speech” (p. 47). Ultimately, Gillespie argued that
49
these guidelines matter because they reveal the platform’s values and the underlying theories of
governance and rights.
Finally, the most visible yet taken-for-granted part of the platform’s governance apparatus
is its interface architecture. Media and communication scholars have long stressed the material
and political aspects of the interface. In a way similar to how Lessig (1999) perceived the legal,
technological, and political implications of the code, Manovich (2002) argued that the interface
“acts as a code that carries cultural messages” and may “provide its own model of the world, its
own logical system, or ideology” (p. 64). Similarly, Galloway (2012) provided a philosophical take
on the interface as a site of mediation and highlighted its inherently political and ideological
nature, or what he called the interface eect. Ash (2015) proposed a transductive understanding
of the interface to “account for how non-human processes come to have tangibly human eects
on the user of that interface” (p. 31). Stanfill (2015) made these goals and eects more explicit,
arguing that the design of the web interface is embedded with, reflects, and reinforces social
logics and cultural norms. In a Foucauldian sense, Stanfill argued that the power of web interface
is necessarily productive, providing users with “the normative or ‘correct’ or path of least
resistance” (p. 1060).
Understanding the interface as a normative statement about the intended use of the web
page highlights what user activities are allowed on a particular website. This is exactly what the
concept of aordance captures. Originating from the field of ecological psychology, the concept
was conceived by Gibson (1986) as “what [the environment] oers the animal, what it provides or
furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127, emphasis in original). Later adopted in design studies and
human-computer-interaction, Norman (1988) defined aordances as “the perceived and actual
properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing
could possibly be used” (p. 9). Emphasizing the dimension of user perception, Hartson (2003)
further divided the term into four categories: cognitive aordances, physical aordances, sensory
aordances, and functional aordances to refer to design features that allow users to,
respectively, know something, perform a physical action, sense something, and accomplish
some goal. In media and communication research, Davis and Chouinard (2016) focused on the
diverse subject-artifact relations and proposed six mechanisms of aordance – request, demand,
50
allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse – which take shape through three interconnected
conditions – perception (i.e., whether users are aware of the aordances), dexterity (i.e., whether
users have the know-how to exploit the aordances), and cultural and institutional legitimacy
(i.e., whether certain aordances are deemed socially acceptable). “Together, the mechanisms
and conditions constitute a dynamic and structurally situated model that addresses how artifacts
aord, for whom and under what circumstances” (p. 241, emphasis in original). In order to clarify
the ambiguity and confusion between “true” aordances and features of a site or outcomes of an
aordance, Evans et al. (2017) proposed several threshold criteria for substantiating the use of
the term, highlighting concepts such as anonymity, persistence, and visibility as robust examples
for aordance-related terminology. These concepts, and other aordance-based conceptual
variations (Bucher & Helmond, 2018), help demonstrate how the platform’s interface design
functions as important governance mechanisms to shape user activities “with specific norms and
values inscribed in their architectures” (van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 3).
Cultural Institutions as Platform Complementors
As cultural institutions started to establish their presence on social media, content
sharing, and aggregation platforms, they became platform complementors and began to integrate
the platform’s boundary resources into their content creation. While Poell et al. (2022)
demonstrated how the adoption of boundary resources reshaped the practices of platform
complementors in dierent communities – from game developers to podcasters, from music and
book publishing to online journalism – traditional memory institutions as platform complementors
are faced with unique challenges not least because of their public orientation, organizational
complexity, and historically slow adoption of new technologies.
Parry (2007) recounted the sluggish adoption of computers in the museum sector since
the 1960s and highlighted a fundamental disconnect and incompatibility between museums as
social institutions and computers as an emerging technology, especially how automation and
standardization in the 1970s “contorted curatorial practice” by imposing a new epistemological
structure and “the tyranny of the classifying code” on the perception and management of
museum collections (pp. 49-50). For Parry, this incompatibility was not a historical legacy. Rather,
museums in the early twenty-first century seemed to have the same debates about digital
51
technologies that started back in the late 1960s. The use of external platforms, along with their
boundary resources, is one of the current challenges that continues to contort curatorial practices
by imposing yet another epistemological structure on museum collections.
Museum scholars have also emphasized the role played by organizational dynamics and
internal hierarchies in shaping the adoption and integration of new technologies into content
management and curatorial practices (Anderson, 1999; Bautista, 2014; Hvenegaard Rasmussen
et al., 2022). Debate about institutional priorities with regard to information management, for
instance, “often exposes fundamentally dierent perspectives within organizations. Established
practices reflect and reinforce entrenched beliefs, customs and power relations” (Peacock, 2007,
p. 62). Many scholars in science and technology studies use the social construction of technology
(SCOT) framework to understand how dierent social groups can interpret new artifacts – from
household appliances to transportation systems – in vastly dierent ways (Hughes, 2012; Klein &
Kleinman, 2002; Kline & Pinch, 1996; Pinch & Bijker, 2012). In this sense, digital platforms may
function as what Star and Griesemer (1989) termed “boundary objects,” adaptable enough to
meet the specific needs of multiple groups while maintaining a consistent identity across
dierent contexts, therefore playing the role of translation within a heterogeneous organization.
Applying the SCOT framework in the museum context, I have elsewhere demonstrated that non-
curatorial employees such as educators and researchers may shape how museums understand
and pursue open-related practices depending on social values institutionalized by these sta
members (Cao, 2024).
Emphasizing the heterogeneity of museum professionals and their social values resonates
with previous research on the discourse of new museology, which, as I argued in the Introduction,
not only challenged the centrality of curators and highlighted the museum’s information and
educational functions (Bennett, 1990; Stam, 1993; Vergo, 1989; Weil, 1999), but also served as
the philosophical foundation, along with the impetus of neoliberal cultural policy, for cultural
institutions to increasingly use and collaborate with external platforms in order to better address
the needs of the broader public. In other words, “for [museum] content to be truly accessible, it
needs to be where the users are, embedded in their daily networked lives” (Waibel & Erway,
52
quoted in Baltussen et al., 2013), and our daily networked lives, as it happens, have long been
embedded in various digital platforms.
The platform metaphor, as Gillespie (2017) argued, tends to obscure its intricate and
multi-layered structure as well as the diverse and sometimes conflicting communities that
inhabit the platform space. As platform complementors, cultural institutions therefore add to the
intricacy and potential contention of platform governance, as dierent internal groups – curators,
educators, marketing, and digital teams – may have competing internal priorities and interpret the
intended use of the platform in entirely dierent manners. It is also for this reason that case
studies of museum digital initiatives consistently emphasized the importance of communication
and collaboration between dierent internal functional groups within the organization (Cachia,
2014; Petrelli et al., 2016; Pietroni, 2019).
GA&C as Platform Provider
Despite the semantic richness and occasional “swirling vortex of confusion” with respect
to the exact characteristics of platforms, this dissertation follows the definitions provided by Poell
et al. (2019) and van Dijck et al. (2018) to unpack the governance mechanisms of GA&C and the
process of platformization as it unfolds in the cultural sector. As a sectoral platform, GA&C
integrates its institutional partners with the company’s core infrastructural services (e.g., Search,
Maps, Street View, Experiments) by providing them with a variety of boundary resources (e.g.,
digitization services, content management systems, content guidelines, and help resources) they
can use both on the platform and in their own organizational infrastructures. As the platform’s free
but proprietary infrastructural services gradually replace the legacy infrastructures of the cultural
sector, the result would be the standardization of cultural heritage reproduction that becomes
increasingly platform-dependent.
In the meantime, the platform presents a two-sided market (as it currently does not run
ads) mediating the interactions, however limited, between institutional partners and end-users,
regulated by the company’s general terms of service and the platform’s contractual agreements.
The extremely limited user aordances are both a part and the result of the platform’s interface
architectures, which present a normative statement about how the platform is intended to be
used. More importantly, GA&C’s interface architectures also reveal the values underlying its
53
design choices and, to borrow Manovich’s (2002) words, Google’s “own model of the world, its
own logical system, or ideology” (p .64).
However, the question remains how, if at all, GA&C’s institutional partners use these tools
and resources as intended in their daily operations. For Poell et al. (2019), platformization is as
much about the changes in infrastructures, market relations, and governance frameworks as it is
about the resulting cultural practices. While analyzing the platform itself may address the former,
understanding the changing cultural practices as platformization unfolds within the cultural sector
necessitates an empirically grounded approach that takes into account both the ways in which
GA&C’s institutional partners adopt, negotiate, or resist these boundary resources on the ground,
as well as the extent to which these resources have restructured their organizational practices.
Summary
This section describes the rise of the platform as a dominant form of economic structure,
social paradigm, discursive positioning, and productive power. Through the process of
platformization, digital platforms have penetrated dierent economic sectors and spheres of life
with their infrastructures, economic logic, and governance frameworks. This process and the
resulting institutional practices are reinforced through a variety of governance mechanisms,
including the distribution of boundary resources, the imposition of community guidelines and
terms and service, as well as the creation of an interface architecture that aords users dierent
kinds of activities. With an established tradition of public service, a complex organizational
structure, and slow adoption of new technologies in the past, cultural institutions as platform
complementors present additional challenges as they adopt the platform’s boundary resources.
In the next chapter, I outline the data collection and analytical methods I adopted to address the
three primary research questions raised at the end of the Introduction.
54
Chapter 3: Methods
In the previous chapter, I outlined the theoretical framework of the dissertation by
unpacking the concepts of virtual museum, digital enclosure, and platform governance. These
concepts highlight the tension between the rhetoric of access and the reality of control and
situate the Google Arts & Culture platform within broader scholarly discourses about the
intersection between cultural institutions and media technologies. In this chapter, I introduce the
methodological approaches taken to investigate not only what the platform does but also how its
institutional partners use the platform in practice. As a reminder, the research questions of the
dissertation are:
• RQ1: How did the initiative evolve from the original Google Art Project into the current
iteration of Google Arts & Culture?
• RQ2: How does Google Arts & Culture present cultural content on the platform?
o RQ2a: What types of curatorial interventions does the platform perform?
o RQ2b: How does the platform’s interface design condition the presentation of
individual cultural objects?
• RQ3: How do cultural institutions use Google Arts & Culture?
o RQ3a: Why did institutions decide (not) to join the platform?
o RQ3b: How do institutions utilize the platform’s tools and resources?
o RQ3c: How is the use of the platform influenced by its governance mechanisms?
These questions not only address the role played by GA&C but also focus on the practices
and responses of its institutional partners, highlighting the importance of investigating the mutual
articulation between institutional changes and cultural practices in the process of platformization
(Poell et al., 2019), as well as the contingent and contested nature of platform governance
(Katzenbach & Ulbricht, 2019). In order to address these research questions, I adopted a mixed-
methods approach that combines archival analysis, content analysis, discursive interface
analysis, and in-depth interviews.
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RQ1: Reconstructing Platform Timeline
RQ1 examines how the platform has positioned and presented itself to the public and its
institutional partners as it transitioned from the Art Project to the current iteration of GA&C. This
question is a direct response to the platform’s abbreviated, if not mythologized, oicial origin story
and the lack of transparency in how the platform operated in its early years and developed over
time. I addressed the questions of self-presentation, both indirectly through the design and
functions of the platform’s website and mobile app interfaces, and directly through its mission
statements and communications with partner institutions. Specifically, I reconstructed a more
nuanced platform timeline using archival analysis based on archived webpages of the platform’s
previous iterations, earlier versions of the mobile app, and archived email communications
between GA&C and its institutional partners. The findings of these analyses are discussed in
Chapter 4.
Archival Analysis
The current GA&C website has undergone extensive changes, both in terms of style and
structure, since its initial launch in 2011. While the platform does not have an oicial timeline of
its own development, researchers and archivists have maintained an extensive dataset of how
the platform’s web presence has changed over the years using the Wayback Machine, a web
archiving tool that allows users to save web pages and view archived versions of websites from
the past.7 In order to reconstruct a more complete timeline of the platform, I first used the
Wayback Machine and Link Grabber (a browser extension that extracts outgoing links on a
webpage) to analyze previous versions of the GA&C website, focusing in particular on the
structure of the homepage, as well as the positioning of the platform and its mission statements.
The rationale for this media archaeological approach is the understanding of the website as an
“archived object in a historiographical tradition akin to the biographical” (Rogers, 2013, p. 65). In
other words, the biographical information of a website, including its design and structure – internal
7 The tool is free to use, but the archiving of web pages is not automatic, and a user has to choose to “save page now”
on any given day. The display of the original page layout is not perfect either: most interactive components may not
work anymore, and dierent web elements (e.g., images, text boxes) sometimes overlap on top of one another.
56
components as well as links to external websites – all reflect both design and organizational
considerations that went into the creation of the website.
In addition to the website, GA&C also launched a mobile app in late 2015. Although early
versions of the app closely resembled the design principles and content strategies of the website
– versions 1.0 of the app simply redirected users to the website – the app has drastically pivoted
since 2019, increasingly highlighting camera-based features that are only supported on mobile
devices, playful experiences based on a growing collection of games, and most recently an
“Inspire” section that mimics the “snap scrolling” style of content navigation now commonly seen
on social media platforms. Similar to the website, the app is another important aspect of the
platform’s biography, and tracing its changing design and functions is therefore another essential
part of reconstructing the platform’s historical timeline. While the Wayback Machine only saves
webpages, Google’s own Android mobile operating system allows users to install current or
previous versions of an app using APK (Android Package Kit) files, which are available on many
APK archiving websites. To access these previous versions, I used the website APKMirror, which
oers access to the app’s more than 60 APK files and keeps a record of its release notes as they
originally appeared in the app store, detailing changes made to each version of the app.8 In
addition to comparing the oicial release notes, I also examined how the app has evolved by
installing and using, through an abbreviated walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), previous
versions of the app to understand how it has gradually diverged from the website by highlighting a
dierent set of content and features for the users.
Finally, the GA&C team has been reaching out to partner institutions through emails on a
regular basis, calling for participation in upcoming projects, showcasing and promoting new tools
and features, as well as recapping seasonal highlights and annual achievements. Not only are
these email communications part of the platform’s outreach and engagement eorts, but they
also constitute an important aspect of its value propositions in that they directly convey a
message to the partners about the platform’s most important functions and how they, according
to the platform, may help to achieve their mission statements. A copy of these email records
between 2016 and 2023 was provided by one of the cultural institutions that I interviewed (more
8 See https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/art s-culture.
57
on the interviews in the section about RQ3). Although not all partners received the same emails
throughout the years – as coordinators from the GA&C team may have sent out customized
messages every now and then – this email archive contains bulk messages intended for all U.S.-
based partners, including messages regarding “Year in Review,” “Seasons Greetings,” and updates
and reminders about new tools and features. I analyzed these emails to understand how the
platform has been trying to stay connected with its institutional partners and how it has presented
and positioned the initiative as the platform itself was going through regular changes over the
years.
RQ2: Analyzing Content Presentation
RQ2 investigates content presentation on GA&C, including how the platform’s curatorial
and editorial interventions have aected the prioritization of select partners and topics on an
aggregate level (RQ2a) and how the platform’s interface design conditions content presentation
on an individual level (RQ2b). While RQ2a is based on the argument that content curation has
always been an essential part of GA&C and presents a deep dive into one particular editorialized
section on the platform, RQ2b analyzes the platform’s various aordances and how its interface
design shapes the presentation of individual objects and in so doing constructs an idealized user
with a particular mode of engagement. I used a combination of qualitative content analysis and
discursive interface analysis, supplemented by interviews with the partners and the GA&C
Program Manager (see next section on RQ3). These findings are discussed in Chapter 5.
Content Analysis
For RQ2a, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of the “Tod a y’s top picks” (TTP)
section on GA&C to highlight the platform’s curatorial and editorial role. As an essential
governance mechanism, digital platforms utilize content curation to structure content (in)visibility
through interface design and algorithmic sorting. GA&C has always played a curatorial and
editorial role since the platform’s inception, from inviting select institutions to become its initial
partners to featuring select artworks and artists on the homepage. In recent years, these
curatorial interventions have become routinized on the platform with recurring sections such as
“Today ’s top picks” and “Weekly highlights.”
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I chose TTP as the data source for the content analysis for several reasons. First, since its
introduction in August 2020, TTP has always been featured on the platform’s homepage. For over
two years, it was consistently placed at the top of the homepage and the mobile app, occupying
the “first-page real estate” and attracting more user attention than content elsewhere located
(Rogers, 2019). The “Weekly highlights” section, by contrast, is placed on the Explore page at a
much lower position unless a user opts in to receive weekly newsletter emails. Second, while
Weekly highlights include 10 to 12 recommended stories, TTP includes five dierent stories and is
updated almost on a daily basis, providing a more extensive source of data for analysis. Most
importantly, I argue that using the words “top” and “pick” is a deliberate design and semantic
choice that epitomizes and literalizes the platform’s curatorial functions. Finally, using the
Wayback Machine, I was able to trace and collect almost all of the “top picks” between August
2020 and December 2021, whereas the URL for the Weekly highlights page has only been
archived infrequently.
Through content analysis of the TTP section, I identified the overall trends of the featured
content – including content types (e.g., stories, projects, artworks, or games) frequently featured
on the home page and the institutions that created the content (especially their country of origin)
– in order to oer a systematic and historical account of the editorial and curatorial role played by
the GA&C team.
Discursive Interface Analysis
For RQ2b, I focused on GA&C’s interface architecture, which, as the platform’s most
visible governance mechanism, provides users with some actions while prohibiting others, and in
so doing conditions the participatory potential of the platform regardless of the content being
presented. The process of digital enclosure also depends on what users are allowed to do with
cultural resources presented on the platform, which in turn depends not only on the legal code of
copyright law but also on the computational code of interface architecture (Lessig, 2006). In other
words, GA&C’s interface architecture presents a normative statement about the platform’s
intended use, both in relation to the users it serves and the cultural commons it supposedly
encloses.
59
Advancing an understanding of the productive power, in a Foucauldian sense, of the web
interface, which reflects and reinforces social logics and cultural norms, Stanfill (2015) proposed
what is called discursive interface analysis (DIA) to interrogate a web page’s intended use, or “the
assumptions built into interfaces as the normative or ‘correct’ or path of least resistance” (p.
1060). Stanfill’s analytical framework is based on Hartson’s (2003) classification of aordances
into four groups: sensory aordances support the operations of cognitive and physical
aordances, which in turn serve the realization of functional aordances. For Stanfill, cognitive
aordances (e.g., names, labels, and taglines) facilitate information processing and are thus
“closely tied to the social act of meaning-making” (p. 1063), while sensory aordances can be
analyzed through the visibility, legibility, and audibility of certain web elements.
I adopted DIA to address how GA&C’s interface architecture imagines users as passive
viewers and encloses cultural resources in the public domain behind the platform’s proprietary
technologies. For instance, does the interface allow users to download an image for creative
reuse, or does it limit the mode of engagement to viewing and sharing? What types of visual or
textual information (e.g., icons and labels) does the interface provide to facilitate users’ cognitive
and meaning-making processes? The DIA approach considers answers to these questions as
“productive” because they produce a normative statement about a platform’s intended use and
therefore the ideal role users should assume accordingly.
Specifically, I used one artwork, The Milkmaid (1658) by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer,
as an example to demonstrate how its digital copy is presented on three websites with vastly
dierent interface design: GA&C, Europeana (a digital cultural heritage platform supported by the
EU), and Rijksmuseum (where the physical painting is located). I chose The Milkmaid in part
because the painting has long been in the public domain and is therefore copyright-free. Its
European hosting institutions also allow the comparison of its display between two ideologically
dierent platform environments, one supported by a private U.S.-based technology company and
the other funded in part by the EU, which openly champions a commons-based approach to
preserving and disseminating public cultural resources (Edwards, 2015).
RQ3: Unveiling Platform Use
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RQ3 examines the use of the GA&C platform by cultural institutions, including the
rationales for joining (or rejecting) the platform (RQ3a), the actual use of the platform’s tools and
resources (RQ3b), and the influence of the platform’s governance mechanisms on this process
(RQ3c). Although the platform’s governance framework imposes a variety of mechanisms that
shape the practices of its institutional partners, these power dynamics are by no means
unconditional or uncontested. Institutions and sta members may choose to adopt some of what
the platform has to oer while rejecting others. Most importantly, existing studies on GA&C have
primarily focused on the platform itself, rather than how, if at all, it is used by partner institutions
or how internal dynamics within these institutions may influence the adoption of external tools. I
addressed this research gap by oering empirical evidence about the use of the platform through
semi-structured, in-depth interviews.
In addition, I also referred to GA&C’s content guidelines and partner agreements to
provide contextual information about the use of the platform and the overall partnership with
cultural institutions. Content guidelines are publicly available on the Help Center. Although
partnership agreements signed between GA&C and its institutional partners are typically
unavailable to the general public, I obtained three copies of the agreements. One of them was
obtained from the University of Texas at Austin (a public institution) through the Tex a s Public
Information Act, which grants the public the right to inspect and obtain copies of government
records (Oice of the Attorney General, 2018). Two institutions that I interviewed agreed to
provide a redacted version of their agreement but wished to remain anonymous for the purpose of
this study. The findings of these analyses are discussed in Chapter 6.
Semi-Structured Interviews
As I mentioned in the Introduction, this dissertation examines cultural institutions based in
the U.S. due to its unique cultural policy environment in which the private sector has an outsized
influence on traditional memory institutions, which would presumably rely more on collaborating
with initiatives such as GA&C to fulfill some of its institutional functions. I therefore focused on
recruiting individuals from U.S.-based institutions, which are either currently hosted on GA&C or
have considered joining the platform, as the potential interviewees. As of August 2023, there are
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673 U.S.-based cultural institutions hosted on the platform, each with a landing page showing the
number of items they have uploaded and the number of stories they have created.
Four institutions located in the city of Austin were first recruited as part of a pilot interview.
Subsequently, I reached out to users of the MCN (Museum Computer Network) Forum and
attendees of the MCN 2023 Annual Conference. Dating from 1967, MCN is a U.S.-based non-
profit organization aimed at supporting the integration of technology within the museum
community, and the MCN annual conference is one of the largest museum technology
conferences worldwide attended by both museum practitioners and scholars (Marty & Kim,
2020). In addition, MCN Forum is an online discussion board and email listserv for cultural sector
professionals to exchange information on resources, jobs, and events, and engage in discussions
about current trends and challenges.9 I first posted a recruitment message on MCN Forum and
then used the public attendee list of the annual conference to reach out to attendees whose
institutions are hosted on GA&C. A total of 13 interviews were scheduled through this recruitment
process. Three additional interviews were scheduled after several individuals recommended their
counterparts from another institution to share their experience.
A total of 20 interviews were conducted with 26 individuals from 23 cultural institutions
between September 2023 and March 2024. Four interviews were group sessions, while three
individuals have worked with GA&C at multiple institutions. Three interviews were conducted in
person, while the others were conducted remotely on Zoom. The interviews were transcribed and
then analyzed with a combination of open and axial coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) – using the
software ATLAS.ti 24 – to identify recurring themes based on the interviewees’ personal accounts.
This iterative coding process was based on the narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) and thematic
analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) approaches and aims to demonstrate how individuals from the
partner institutions experienced, contextualized, and recalled the process of discussing and using
the platform internally, as well as to identify overarching patterns that emerge by comparing and
contrasting these personal accounts.
These 23 mostly U.S.-based institutions, including the numbers of items and stories they
contributed to the platform, are listed in Ta b l e 1. The position of individual interviewees was
9 See https://groups.io/g/mcn.
62
omitted to ensure their anonymity, but their job titles are primarily related to the institution’s use
of technologies or work in the digital space, such as chief digital oicer, director of technology,
curator of digital experience, social media & digital content manager, manager of digital records,
and web manager. Several institutions require a special note:
• Royal Ontario Museum (#8) and Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich City Museum) (#17)
are the only two institutions not based in the U.S.
• Harry Ransom Center (#18) and The Mesoamerica Center (#19), both ailiated with the
University of Texas at Austin, have considered but ultimately decided not to join the
platform.
• Institutions #20 and #21 are currently in the process of establishing a partnership with
GA&C and have requested to remain anonymous for the purpose of the study.
• Cultural Heritage Imaging (#22) is a non-profit organization that specializes in creating
digital capture and documentation tools and practices for the preservation of cultural and
historical heritage.
• Curationist (#23) is a non-profit project of the MHz Foundation that hosts public domain
images of works from 13 museums at the moment of the interview.
Individuals from institutions #8, #18, #22, and #23 responded to my recruitment message in the
MCN Forum and kindly oered to share their experiences with GA&C. Although these institutions
are not the platform’s existing partners, they nonetheless oered great insights into the operation
and perception of GA&C within the broader cultural sector. Finally, several interviewees facilitated
an introduction and then one additional interview with a Program Manager from the Google Arts &
Culture team. This interview helped clarify some of the ambiguities and (mis)perceptions about
the platform’s operations and will be used to address RQ1 and RQ2 as well. A list of all interview
questions is included in Appendix A.
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Table 1. Interviewed institutions with the number of items and stories.
# Institution Objects Stories
1 The Metropolitan Museum of Art 201,174 39
2 The J. Paul Getty Museum 71,358 52
3 National Gallery of Art 42,488 3
4 Dallas Museum of Art 15,177 3
5 Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields 6,056 5
6 Walters Art Museum 1,838 1
7 Harvard Art Museums 1,133 4
8 Royal Ontario Museum (Canada) 763 6
9 Philadelphia Museum of Art 231 0
10 Texas Archive of the Moving Image 204 2
11 Denver Art Museum 171 1
12 Getty Research Institute 150 4
13 Georgia O’Keee Museum 92 2
14 Blanton Museum of Art 77 1
15 Voces Oral History Project 71 1
16 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute 68 4
17 Münchner Stadtmuseum (Germany) 52 1
18 Harry Ransom Center - -
19 The Mesoamerica Center - -
20 [anonymized] - -
21 [anonymized] - -
22 Cultural Heritage Imaging - -
23 Curationist - -
Finally, it is worth noting the degree to which this conveniently and purposively assembled
sample represents the overall U.S.-based institutional partners, especially in terms of how
actively they make use of the platform. For all 673 U.S.-based institutions, I gathered the numbers
of their items and stories and presented a summary plot in Figure 3. The average number of items
uploaded is 8,011 (indicated by the × sign), heavily skewed by active partners on the platform,
whereas the number of items for the middle %50 of the institutions ranges from 83 (Q1) to 256
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(Q3). Similarly, but to a lesser extent, the average number of stories is 5.6 (indicated by the ×
sign), with the middle %50 ranging from 1 (Q1) to 6 (Q3). Outliers are omitted from Figure 3 since
showing the highest story count of 220 would render the remaining data points too closely
clustered for the figure to be legible. Figure 4 compares the distribution of the two numbers of the
entire population (i.e., 673 institutions, shown in blue) and the sample (i.e., 17 institutions that are
currently hosted on the platform, shown in orange). Outliers are included in Figure 4, but the
numbers are log-transformed to normalize the distribution and minimize the impact of outliers
while maintaining the legibility of the graphs. It is also for this reason that a y-axis is not included.
In any case, Figure 4 demonstrates the representativeness of the sample relative to the entire
population. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sampled institutions are skewed towards active users of
the platform, contributing more items on average than the population and including some top
contributors in terms of uploading items. In the meanwhile, the sample can be seen as a fair
representation of the population in terms of how many stories have been created.
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Figure 3. The distribution of item (left) and story (right) numbers among U.S.-based institutions.
Outliers are excluded from display to increase legibility.
Figure 4. The distribution of item (left) and story (right) numbers for population and sample.
Outliers are included, but the numbers are log-transformed to increase legibility.
0
1,000
2,000
3,000
4,000
5,000
6,000
7,000
8,000
9,000
Number of Items
population
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Number of Stories
population
Number of Items (logged)
population sample
Number of Stories (logged)
population sample
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Chapter 4: Reconstructing Platform Timeline: A Story of Convergence and
Divergence
In this chapter, I discuss how the Google Arts & Culture platform has presented itself to
both individual users and institutional partners, as it evolved from the original Art Project to its
current incarnation as of January 2024 (QR1). This analysis is based on the examination of
archived materials from several sources, including webpages of the platform retrieved using the
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, update logs and screenshots of the platform’s mobile app
obtained by installing its previous versions, as well as email records sent from the platform team
to one of the U.S. institutional partners. The analysis is supplemented by interviews conducted
with the GA&C Program Manager (PM), who shared some of the rationale for how the platform
was designed and implemented, as well as institutional partners, who occasionally made
references to features of the platform’s previous versions. By reconstructing a more complete
timeline and platform biography, this chapter sheds light on the evolution of the GA&C, both
aesthetically and functionally, in the past 13 years. In so doing, it also highlights the changing roles
the platform claimed to play both for the public and its institutional partners.
Google Cultural Institute? A Story of Convergence
The current GA&C website has changed extensively since the launch of the Google Art
Project in 2011. Unless otherwise stated, all dates and screenshots presented in this section are
based on the archived pages retrieved using the Wayback Machine.10 The Art Project website11
has been archived regularly since its launch on February 1 of 2011. The original website included
a homepage that listed the 17 initial institutional partners and an FAQ page with a link to the
project’s YouTube Channel (Figure 5). This minimal web interface received an update on April 3 of
2012, when the initiative announced its first major expansion, now hosting 151 museums from 40
countries and adding new tools and social media integration (Sood, 2012). This update marked an
important step-up of the platform’s editorial and curatorial role, however rudimentary, as it started
10 Between December 2015 and April 2020, the platform’s About page included a timeline for its development
between January 2011 to April 2016. My analysis referenced some of the activities mentioned in this oicial timeline.
Valtýsson (2020) provided a detailed analysis of this timeline.
11 See http://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/www.googleartproject.com.
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to showcase one artwork and later a “Featured” section on its homepage (Figure 6). In October
2012, another 29 institutions joined the initiative, making the total number of partners reach 180
(Adamczyk, 2012).
As the Art Project continued to grow, the occasionally mentioned Cultural Institute was
also expanding. The earliest available Cultural Institute website (archived on March 28 of 2012)
consisted of two sections – Home and About (Figure 7) – with links to six dierent projects: the
Art Project, three digitization projects in collaboration with Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory,
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center,
and two 3D modelling projects using Google Earth technologies in partnership with Paris Center
for Architecture and Urbanism and the Maison de l’Histoire de France (a stillborn museum project
abandoned in December 2012). Google’s plans for the Cultural Institute in fact grew out of the
two pilot projects with The Israel Museum and Yad Vashem, which predated the launch of the Art
Project (Pfanner, 2011). At that point, the Art Project and the Cultural Institute were hosted on two
dierent web addresses, and the other five projects were hosted on the respective institutional
partners’ own websites, making the Cultural Institute website more of an informational portal and
aggregator that directed user attention to its institutional partners, rather than attracting web
traic to the Cultural Institute as a content-hosting platform itself.
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Figure 5. Google Art Project homepage (archived February 1, 2011).
Figure 6. Google Art Project homepage (archived April 4, 2012).
69
Figure 7. Google Cultural Institute homepage (archived March 28, 2012).
This portal configuration began to change on May 31 of 2012, when the Cultural Institute
launched the World Wonders Project on its own website, featuring 132 heritage sites from 18
countries using virtual tours, 3D models, and YouTube videos, supplemented with information
provided by partner institutions such as UNESCO, World Monuments Fund, and Getty Images, as
well as downloadable educational materials for classroom use (Blaschke, 2012). On June 5 of
2013, the previously separate Art Project site was migrated to the Cultural Institute site, becoming
one of its permanent and primary sections. Along with the integration came another new interface
design that remained stable for over three years until the platform was renamed Google Arts &
Culture in 2016. This iteration of the homepage (Figure 8) included three featured projects (Art
Project, Historical Moments, and World Wonders), a growing list of other projects shown in the
dropdown menu, and other content such as collections (from partner institutions), exhibits
(curated by partner institutions), and Gigapixels (individual objects with advanced zoom
functions). This integration, unannounced on any oicial channel, also increased the Cultural
Institute’s total number of institutional partners to more than 400.
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Figure 8. Google Art Project homepage (archived May 31, 2016).
Before Google formally introduced the revamped GA&C on July 19 of 2016, a beta version
of the new website12 had been running for more than a month. In terms of interface design and
website functionality, this new edition was very close to GA&C’s current form as of June 2024.
The revamp also came with a new mobile app (more on the app in the next section), first released
on November 30, 2015 (Google, 2015b).
The most recent major update to the platform arrived on April 24 of 2020, when the
homepage became visually identical to how the platform appears as of June 2024. With the name
change, the platform also began to remove all traces of the Cultural Institute label and streamline
its name under the new Google Arts & Culture brand: old URLs of the Art Project and Cultural
Institute were redirected to GA&C; information about the Cultural Institute’s former presence was
removed from the platform, from the About page to the Terms of Service, including the only oicial
timeline of the Cultural Institute for its activities between February 2011 and April 2016; the
Cultural Institute’s oicial YouTube channel, verified with a checkmark even to this day, was
vacated and content migrated. Finally, to put a visual nail in the Institute’s design coin, GA&C
12 See http://web.archive.org/web/20160315000000*/www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/project/art-project.
71
debuted a new logo in January 2023, replacing the old design that resembles the façade of a Doric
temple with one that is the amalgamation of the letters G, A, and C, stylized with the company
logo’s prime colors and in the shape of an ampersand (Perrigo, 2023).13 The last visual semblance
of an physical institute was thus replaced by a constant reminder of the company’s corporate
brand. Nonetheless, the Cultural Institute’s former and current employees continue to use the
two names interchangeably on sites such as LinkedIn, and if one stumbles upon the signup page
for potential new partners, (for now) the welcome message still says, “Google Cultural Institute –
Join Us!” As was later confirmed in the interview with the GA&C PM, the Cultural Institute label is
a legacy term that the team no longer uses to describe the initiative. For all intents and purposes,
the Google Cultural Institute label serves as a vestige of the Art Project’s eclectic origin and an
emblem and reminder of the divergent, if not haphazard, nature of Google’s early venture into the
domain of arts and culture.
The media archaeological exercise presented here uncovers a more nuanced story of the
initiative’s origin and evolution. The early history of the initiative was itself a process of
platformization in that the integration of the Art Project into the Cultural Institute served to
centralize the organization and display of institutional collections, aggregating both web traic
and user attention to one totalized destination managed and controlled by one team of the
company. Despite the uniform design of the GA&C site today, its short history was full of trials and
experiments. Notably, the initial separation of art, historical, and heritage projects with the
Cultural Institute was later replaced with a disciplinary and organizational consolidation under the
“Arts & Culture” label, something decidedly, if not accidentally, symptomatic of the broader digital
convergence among memory institutions at large. This convergence, as I address in Chapter 6, is
not without tension and cracks.
Appnography and the Gamification of User Experience14
13 In July 2023, the logo’s color palette was again replaced with the most recent black and white design.
14 The term “appnography” was first coined by Cousineau et al. (2019) and later revisited by Johnson et al. (2023) for
the study of dating apps. It highlights three methodological considerations: design, user, and researcher. I borrowed
the term to highlight design considerations of the GA&C app, including its technological architecture and temporality,
while acknowledging that my analysis does not have an ethnographic element that would otherwise focus on users
and researchers.
72
If the web history of GA&C is a story of convergence, the history of the mobile app painted
a picture of gradual divergence, not only from the aesthetics and functions of the website, but also
from facilitating institutional partners to entertaining individual users. Before formally launching its
own mobile app in 2015, the Cultural Institute had provided free tools and technologies for
interested institutions partners to build their own mobile apps (Tansley, 2014). This type of
dispersed infrastructural support was soon replaced by a unified mobile access point in late
2015, reversing and redirecting the flow of web traic and user attention to the platform itself
rather than its institutional partners.
Between November 30 of 2015 and March 1 of 2024, a total of 61 versions of the Google
Arts & Culture apps have been released with APK files archived and available for download.
Between the initial release of version 1.0.1 and version 3.0.9 – released 10 days before the
initiative’s rename into Google Arts & Culture on July 19 of 2016 – the app was simply called Arts
& Culture. Each release came with an update note, including a What’s New section and an overall
Description section for the app. Table 2 lists select versions with new information added to the
What’s New section, while Description texts, to which I will return later in this section, are not
included due to their extensive length.
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Table 2. The oicial update log of the app. Versions with no new information provided are omitted.
Version Date What’s New
1.0.1 2015-11-30 Initial version
1.0.6 2016-03-18 Add splash screen.
2.0.5 2016-06-16
New: Save your favorites, plus organize them into Collections for easy viewing and
sharing; other bug fixes and improvements.
3.0.9 2016-07-19 New: Improved share dialog.
…
4.1.2 2016-12-03 Design improvements and bug fixes.
4.2.2 2017-01-17
• Localization improvements
• Bug fixes
…
6.0.5 2017-12-13
• Take a selfie and discover if your portrait is in a museum (Select locations only).
• Bug fixes and minor improvements.
6.1.9 2018-03-14
• Search with your selfie: Now available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand
and parts of the U.S. Stay tuned as we try to improve and expand.
6.2.0 2018-04-16
• Add stories and themes to your Favorites.
• Search with your selfie: Now available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand,
Singapore and parts of the U.S. Stay tuned as we try to improve and expand this
experiment.
• Bug fixes and minor improvements.
6.3.12 2018-06-20
• Browse local landmarks in paintings & photos using the Nearby map.
• Improvements for TalkBack support
• Search with your selfie: Now available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand,
Singapore and parts of the U.S. Stay tuned as we try to improve and expand this
experiment.
6.4.17 2018-08-31
• View paintings in AR: Use augmented reality to see real-size artworks in front of
you.
• Search with your selfie: Now available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan,
Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and parts of the U.S. Stay tuned as we try to improve
and expand this experiment.
…
6.4.19 2018-10-03 • Art Selfie - A playful way to discover art. Now available globally.
…
7.0.11 2019-01-23
Dive into an immersive gallery with all of Vermeer’s artworks, brought together for
the first time
…
7.5.21 2020-04-01
Art Transfer – Can you recognize the artists behind iconic styles? (Re)discover
artworks from famous artists like Frida Kahlo, Keith Haring or Katsushika Hokusai.
Tap the camera icon and get inspired by Art Transfer.
…
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Table 2 (continued)
8.0.19 2020-12-02
Art Filter — The most famous pearl earring, a Samurai helmet, an iconic Van Gogh
self-portrait and more: try on new filters based on artifacts from museums by
tapping the camera icon.
8.1.8 2021-03-30
• Travel the globe with 3 new Pocket Gallery virtual exhibitions. Tap the camera
button to get started.
• Brushes with the World: The first Pocket Gallery with guided audio narration,
taking you around the world through art and sound
• Better Together: Explore social gatherings in art through works by Renoir, Manet,
Rousseau, and more from the Getty’s collection
• From Africa to Japan: Contemporary Japanese and African artworks from the Jean
Pigozzi Collection
…
8.4.8 2021-09-15
• New style sets in Art Transfer to transform your photos using iconic artworks, from
contemporary art to classic portraits
• Unlock badge achievements by exploring interactive camera features
…
9.5.1 2023-01-11
Bring artworks to your home screen with the new Artist of the Day widget. See a new
artwork every morning, from an artist born on this day.
9.6.12 2023-05-23 We’ve given our icon a fresh new design.
…
10.2.3 2023-07-24
• We’ve consolidated our navigation bar into three items - ‘Inspire’, ‘Pla y’ and
‘Explore’.
• Design improvements to the ‘Inspire’ feed make it easier to like, share and find
related content.
• Find our Camera features and other cultural playables in the ‘Play’ tab.
• Use the new ‘Explore’ tab to browse our partners’ wide corpus of cultural content
through topics such as Fashion, Food and Visual arts.
…
It was not until version 6.3.12 (released on June 20 of 2018) that the installation and use
of the app’s previous editions became possible. The earliest versions (from 1.0.1 to 4.0.3) would
simply redirect users to the platform’s website using a browser; when Internet access is disabled,
one would instead receive an error message. Versions 4.1.2 to 6.2.0 were presumably built with
obsolete technical or security parameters, and the app, rather than redirecting users to the
website, would require an update (Figure 9). As screenshots of these earlier versions were not
available through other sources, the analysis presented in this section was based on versions
6.3.12 and later. Although the interface structure has changed throughout the versions, all the
screenshots used in the following analysis show the same content that was being promoted on
the day (July 29 of 2024) these screenshots were captured. Although this analytical approach
75
was very useful in revealing the app’s previous menu structures, labels, and taglines (i.e., cognitive
aordances) and their relative visibility, legibility, and audibility (i.e., sensory aordances), the
resulting screenshots sometimes turned out to be anachronistically jarring with some recently
added features somehow superimposed onto a previous version of the app’s design framework.
Figure 9. Earlier app versions that cannot be retrieved: 1.0.1 (left), 3.0.9 (middle), 4.1.2 (right).
The earliest available version (6.3.12) of the GA&C app closely resembles the design
aesthetics and functional layouts of the initiative’s website, including four main tabs when
launched: Home, Explore, Nearby, and Profile (Figure 10). All four tabs, as well as the sidebar
menu accessed by tapping the top left corner, include identical sections presented on the
website, slightly reformatted in a mobile friendly layout. One of the anachronisms mentioned
earlier is the “swipe up” feature in the Explore tab. This snap scrolling style of navigation
resembles those commonly used on social media platforms, but this feature was in fact not
introduced until much later in version 10.2.3 (released in July 2023). This interface structure
featuring four primary tabs remained in place until version 6.5.13 (released on November 28 of
2018).
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Figure 10. The earliest version (6.3.12) of the app that can be retrieved.
The mobile app’s first major departure from the website was introduced in version 7.0.11
(released on January 23 of 2019), when a camera icon was added to the center of the navigation
bar, with subsequent versions making the icon larger and more prominent (version 7.5.21) and
stylized with Google’s primary colors (version 8.0.16) (Figure 11). This tab gives users direct
access to camera-based, XR-enabled features, such as Art Selfie (discover portraits that look like
you), Color Palette (find art by using the colors of your photo), Art Projector (see how artworks
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look in real size), and Pocket Gallery (wander through immersive galleries and get up close to art).
Before the addition of this dedicated tab, users had to either scroll down the homepage or use the
search bar to locate one of these features. This addition was probably and understandably in
response to the viral popularity of Art Selfie on social media, which, however flawed it may have
been, temporarily made the app the most downloaded “free education application” in the Google
Play Store (Duino, 2018). In subsequent versions, more camera-based features were added to
this section, including Art Transfer (take a photo and transform it with classic artworks), Art Filter
(try filters based on artifacts from museums), Pet Portraits, and most recently, the second edition
of Art Selfie now enabled by generative AI (Shepherd, 2024). Additionally, a Cast function was
added in version 8.0.16 (later removed in version 10.2.3) that allowed users to project an image
onto a second screen in the same Internet environment, while a Favorite tab with a heart icon
replaced the Profile tab, which never included a customizable user profile, except for one’s
Google account, to begin with.
Figure 11. The addition of a new tab for camera-based features: version 7.0.11 (left), 7.5.21
(middle), 8.0.16 (right).
In version 8.0.19 (released on December 2 of 2020), an Achievement section was added
to the sidebar menu, which allows users to see the Badges they earn based on the progression of
their in-app activities, such as using a specific feature or creating one’s own galleries (Figure 12).
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While playful experiences have always been an important part of the app’s camera-based
features, adopting ludological terms such as “achievements” and “badges” was a clear, if not
precursory, sign of the broader gamification trend soon to be embraced by the platform. This trend
became more explicit on June 30 of 2021, when the GA&C website added a Play tab to its
homepage navigation bar. Later, version 8.4.8 (released on September 15 of 2021) also came with
a reworked navigation bar: the Nearby tab was moved to the sidebar menu, whereas a Play tab
with a game controller icon was added (the icon was later changed into a more identifiable
controller shape presumably to avoid confusion) (Figure 13).
Figure 12. The addition of an Achievements section: version 8.0.19.
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Figure 13. The addition of a dedicated Play tab: version 8.4.8 (left, middle), 9.0.27 (right).
Finally, version 10.2.3 (released on July 24 of 2023) completely revamped the design
aesthetics and functional layouts of the app by consolidating the navigation bar into three tabs:
Explore, Play, and Inspire (Figure 14). Instead of replicating dierent sections on the homepage of
the website in a mobile-friendly layout, the new Explore tab highlights six pieces of featured
content, followed by a series of dierent art mediums (e.g., visual arts and crafts), topics (e.g.,
nature, fashion, and food), and ways of browsing (e.g., collections, themes, and Street View). The
Play tab includes camera-based features, a growing list of interactive games, and a Lab section
that, according to the PM, will gradually replace the Experiments website that is currently not part
of the platform. The most radical departure in this current version is perhaps the Inspire tab,
which now fully embraces the snap scrolling way of user navigation, jumping from one “post” to
the next with full screen display and sometimes ready-to-play videos.
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Figure 14. The revamp of the app on July 24 of 2023: version 10.2.3.
Although the complete history of the GA&C mobile app cannot be retrieved due to
technical limitations preventing the use of its earliest versions, the app’s discrete version
numbers, along with detailed update documentation, make it possible to identify incremental
changes that shed light on the larger trend gradually embraced by the app, whereas the updates
made to the website often happened on a continuous basis and thus often flew under the radar.
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Based on the analysis presented in this section, the evolution of the app between June 2018 and
early 2024 can be divided into three phases:
• Versions 1 – 6: creation of the web experience in mobile friendly formats.
• Versions 7 – 9: experimentation with camera-based features and game experiences.
• Versions 10 – present: prioritization of playful experiences.
When asked to confirm whether the highlighting of games and playful experiences was a
deliberate strategy, the PM commented:
Yes, definitely! People love interactive experiences. […] One of the things that we can oer
our partners are new ways of interacting with your content and making it fun and exciting
and delightful. If we say that we’re about education and accessibility, what does that
actually mean? Often times people think art is out of their reach, they think it’s not for
them, they weren’t raised going to museums, or whatever it is. But if you approach it in a
playful and engaging way, maybe then eventually those people will go see that artwork in
the museum themselves. I think “play” is only a good thing in that regard.15
Therefore, the trend of gamification did not result from the whim of some developers, but rather
reflects an intentional eort on the part of the GA&C team to try to engage with the segment of the
public that may not be the cultural sector’s primary audiences. If the development of the GA&C
website is a story of convergence, then the evolution of the app is perhaps one of divergence, not
only from the design aesthetics and functional layouts of the website, but also from a focus on the
needs of partner institutions to the wants of the platform’s individual users. This, as I demonstrate
in Chapter 6, turned out to be a point of tension for many institutional partners.
Mission Statements, Greetings, and Updates
The changes noted above reflect the tensions and dilemmas faced by many institutional
partners. On the one hand, the platform provides tools for institutions to reach new audiences
who may be otherwise uninterested in or even intimidated by arts and culture; on the other hand,
the constant introduction of new features made some partners wonder who this platform is truly
15 Unless otherwise stated, all direct quotes included in the dissertation are based on personal communications with
the interviewees, as described in Chapter 3.
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intended to serve. The latter became especially poignant when many of these features were not
communicated to the partners before they were rolled out. In this section, I address how the
platform presented and positioned itself through an evolving mission statement, as well as how
the GA&C team communicated with its value to the institutional partners on a regular basis.
GA&C’s mission statement, available on the platform’s About page, has undergone several
iterations over the past 13 years:
• “The Google Cultural Institute helps preserve and promote culture online.” (March 2012 –
July 2013)
• “Google has partnered with hundreds of museums, cultural institutions, and archives to
host the world’s cultural treasures online. With a team of dedicated Googlers, we are
building tools that allow the cultural sector to display more of its diverse heritage online,
making it accessible to all.” (July 2013 – April 2015)
• “Founded in 2011, the Google Cultural Institute is a not-for-profit initiative that partners
with cultural organizations to bring the world’s cultural heritage online. We build free tools
and technologies for the cultural sector to showcase and share its riches, making them
more widely accessible to a global audience.”16 (April 2015 – April 2020)
• “Google Arts & Culture is a non-profit initiative. We work with cultural institutions and
artists around the world. Together, our mission is to preserve and bring the world’s art and
culture online so it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere.” (April 2020 – May 2022)
• “Google Arts & Culture is a non-commercial initiative. We work with cultural institutions
and artists around the world. Together, our mission is to preserve and bring the world’s art
and culture online so it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere.”17 (May 2022 – present, as of
June 2024)
What do these changes over time suggest? Not only was the reference to museums and
archives replaced by the umbrella term “cultural institutions,” another sign of the trend of digital
16 The phrase “its riches” was later changed to “their gems.”
17 On May 18 of 2022 (based on the Wayback Machine), the term “non-profit” was changed to “non-commercial”
without any public announcement from Google. The GA&C Program Manager, admitting they do not know the context
of the change, speculated that it was to clarify that GA&C is not a 501(c)(3) organization and not a dierent entity
than Google.
83
convergence, but the current statement has also removed the emphasis on “free tools and
technologies.” Yet, despite the changes in terms and emphasis, access and preservation have
undoubtedly been the two constantly proclaimed foci of the initiative. However, the issue of
preservation was rarely mentioned in the archived web and mobile histories, nor were the tools
and features on the platform intended for preservation purposes. In fact, when referring to the
mission of GA&C, the PM emphasized education and accessibility on several occasions but never
directly mentioned preservation at all. The apparent discrepancy was also mentioned by another
interviewee, an imaging expert, who repeatedly and vehemently challenged Google’s alleged
commitment to cultural heritage preservation:
As entertainment, as a game, as something for fun, I don’t see anything wrong with it. The
concern is that people start presenting things like this as actual examples of preservation,
and it’s going to start confusing people. […] Particularly for small museums, historic sites,
underfunded cultural heritage organizations, [Google is] harming and not helping, because
they believe that their site is being preserved and documented, and what [Google is] doing
is not preservation or documentation by any measure.
The disparity between the mission statement’s claims and the platform’s actual oerings
can also be seen in the email communications from the GA&C team to partner institutions. The
email records analyzed in this section were generously provided by one institution, which joined
the platform in late 2016. The records included 12 emails that spanned from January 2017 to
December 2023. The dates and subject lines of these emails are listed in Table 3. Among other
things, these emails serve as another reminder of the legacy status of the Google Cultural
Institute label. Not only was the GA&C team still addressing itself as Google Cultural Institute in
April 2017, but most emails were in fact sent from an address that includes “cipartners” in the
local part. The subject line slipup (i.e., “US Bulk”) on December 19 of 2018 more than likely
indicated that at least some of these emails were meant only for U.S.-based institutional partners.
The GA&C team probably reached out to institutional partners more often than these 12 emails
would otherwise indicate, but these emails nonetheless reveal how the initiative positions itself
as a whole and conveys its value through direct communications with its institutional partners.
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Table 3. The dates and subject lines of all 12 emails shared by one institution.
Date Subject Line
January 16, 2017 Google Arts & Culture: 2016 Year in Review Newsletter
April 27, 2017 Updates from the Google Cultural Institute
March 1, 2018 Google Arts & Culture: 2017 Year in Review Newsletter
December 19, 2018 US Bulk
June 3, 2019 Artists Grant x Google Arts and Culture
April 21, 2020 Connected to Culture: an update from Google Arts & Culture
March 2, 2021 Google Arts & Culture’s update 10 years on
August 26, 2021 Google Arts & Culture Storytelling Update
December 13, 2021 Reminder: Google Arts & Culture legacy exhibit tool deprecation & transition to Story Editor
December 20, 2021 Google Arts & Culture (and the blobs) wish you happy 2022
October 1, 2023 The latest Google Arts & Culture features and news for your cultural organization
December 15, 2023 Season’s Greetings from Google Arts & Culture
In terms of content, the 12 emails can be grouped into three categories: greetings (2),
reviews and highlights (3), and project and feature updates (7). The greeting emails are simply
that, annual greetings and check-ins with little substance, only to perhaps remind the partner
institutions of the initiative’s existence. For instance, apart from an animated greeting card with a
link to the Blob Opera game, the email sent on December 20 of 2021 simply said, “Google Arts &
Culture wishes you a happy 2022 in music. Thank you to all our partners in over 80 countries for
continuing to partner with us.” Similarly, the one sent on December 15 of 2023 said:
Wishing each of our partners around the globe a happy holiday season. Here’s to the art
that has connected us, the cultures that have enriched us, and the stories that were
brought to life. Thank you for your continued collaboration and partnership. Explore the
collections from all partners at g.co/arts or via the Android or iOS app.
The three reviews and highlights emails were “Year in Review Newsletter 2016,” “Year in
Review Newsletter 2017,” and “Google Arts & Culture’s update 10 years on.” The 2016 newsletter
included project highlights organized by theme (e.g., Honoring Cultural Contributions and
Traditions) and for each quarter; the 2017 review discussed new tools and features added to the
platform, events and activities organized by the Lab, and project highlights organized by theme
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and for each continent. The 10-year anniversary email18 provided a much more detailed review of
the initiative’s first decade. After reiterating the initiative’s “20% project” origin story, the email first
listed tools and services provided for cultural institutions and highlighted a few featured projects.
It then listed the initiative’s innovative aspects, including the creation of “playful, educational, and
discoverable” cultural experience through games and camera-enabled features, as well as the
work by the Lab in “bringing the tech and creative communities together.” Finally, the email had a
“Beyond Google Arts & Culture” section that talked about the integration of GA&C with Google
Search, Google Assistant (virtual voice assistant), and YouTube.
The remaining emails were about updates to specific features (e.g., how to use Pocket
Gallery or the new Story Editor) or calls for participation in upcoming projects. The latter is worth
mentioning in that it highlights the editorial role played by the platform. For instance, the email
sent on April 27 of 2017 mentioned two theme projects:
At the moment, we are preparing two new theme projects - Latino Culture for Hispanic
Heritage Month and Inventions & Discoveries.
• Our Hispanic Heritage Month project is scheduled to launch in September and
will highlight the diverse stories, artworks, images and historic objects that reflect
the background, experiences and impact of Latinos in the U.S. June 15th is the
content preparation deadline.
• Inventions & Discoveries is scheduled for the end of the year; we aim to
collaborate with cultural organizations around the world that are on the forefront of
science and technology and will share the stories of the world’s greatest
inventions and discoveries in engaging new ways.
Please let us know by Friday, May 5th, 2017 if you would like to participate in either of the
launches, or would like to know more.
Similarly, the inaptly titled “US Bulk” email sent on December 19 of 2018 said:
As you may know, Black History Month is coming up in February. As we do every year, we
are looking to refresh our Black History and Culture page. We are wondering if you have
any stories you would like to contribute this year from your archive. Let us know if you have
anything in mind. It would be great to include you in our eorts!
18 See also https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/arts-culture/google-arts-culture-turns-10.
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These calls for participation were also unique in that they were all sent from individual Project
Managers instead of the generic “cipartners” email address. As the PM confirmed in the interview,
“Oftentimes we’ll reach out to an organization if they’re connected to a project that we’re working
on.” Therefore, the two emails shown above were likely targeted communications sent to cultural
institutions that the GA&C team considered to be a potential fit for the respective project.
Despite the small number of emails analyzed in this section, these communication
records highlight the types of messages the GA&C team conveyed to its partners. These
messages included calls for participation in upcoming projects, description and promotion of new
tools and features, highlights of previous projects, as well as occasional greetings and check-ins.
On the one hand, the messages are consistent with how GA&C positions itself in relation to the
institutional partners. According to the PM:
Our goal is to be a tech partner to the cultural ecosystem. That means many dierent
things, and sometimes that means amplification. […] I would often describe us as a
toolbox because I find that’s the easiest way for people to understand what we do. It helps
explain that we wear a lot of dierent hats and support in a lot of dierent ways.
On the other hand, from deciding the topic of the projects to inviting cultural institutions to
participate, the metaphors of “amplification” and “toolbox” belied the editorial and curatorial
functions played by the GA&C team, especially those individual Project Managers who reached
out to select cultural institutions they considered to be ideal contributors of upcoming projects.
For the participating institutions, the condition of visibility, in other words, takes place long before
anything concrete is implemented on the platform.
Summary
What exactly does this reconstructed institutional timeline, however piecemeal and
incomplete, mean for GA&C as a sociotechnical platform? Based on archival analysis of the
platform’s web histories, app histories, and communication histories with its institutional
partners, this chapter has demonstrated: 1) the convergence of a variety of initiatives in
collaboration with the cultural sector into one unified corporate brand of Google Arts & Culture, as
well as the convergence of dierent types of cultural institutions into one networked environment
controlled by an integrated governance regime; 2) the divergence of the GA&C mobile app, and to
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some extend the platform itself, from the initial focus on curating an aggregated collection
catalogue to the promotion of interactive and playful experiences for individual users; and 3) the
purported commitment to facilitating access to and preservation of institutional collections by
providing an ever-expanding set of tools and channels of amplification.
The confluence of convergence and divergence, however, sometimes means it is not
always clear who the platform is truly intended to serve. When asked about the platform’s primary
users – institutional partners or individual users – the PM commented:
I would say the challenging thing about this team is that there’s a lot of ambiguity. In a
sense, it’s both. Our partners are a top priority for us, but then obviously users are a priority
for us too, not only because we want to provide a great user experience, but also because
users are a priority for our partners. That’s one of the oerings that we bring. So, really it’s
both, which I know is not a very satisfactory answer.
This ambiguity partly explains the disparity between the aspiration of the mission
statement and the reality of the platform’s implementation, which, as I discuss in Chapter 6, was
a consistent source of tension and frustration for many partners. Nonetheless, what remains
decidedly unambiguous is the editorial and curatorial role played by the GA&C team. By
describing what the platform oers as building tools for cultural institutions to showcase their
content, GA&C perfectly embraces the platform metaphor that imagines itself as a neutral
facilitator (Gillespie, 2017). Therefore, the mission statements sidestep and overlook the
initiative’s fundamental role as a cultural mediator since its conception, performing important
editorial and curatorial interventions by inviting some institutions (over others) to be its initial
partners, featuring some artworks, projects, and institutions (over others) on its front page, and
recommending some content (over others) in a variety of curated sections. These interventions,
regardless of the platform imaginary as a mere intermediary, negate any claim of neutral
facilitation. In the next chapter, I oer a deep dive into the platform’s editorial and curatorial
functions, the conditioning eect of the interface design on the presentation of individual objects,
and the resulting conception of an idealized user profile.
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Chapter 5: Dissecting Content Presentation: From Editorial Intervention to
Interface Design
In this chapter, I analyze content presentation on the Google Arts & Culture platform
(RQ2), including how the platform’s editorial and curatorial interventions prioritize certain types of
content from certain institutions on an aggregate level (RQ2a) and how its interface regime
conditions the presentation of individual objects (RQ2b). This chapter builds upon the argument
presented in the previous chapters that content curation – from inviting select cultural institutions
to highlighting select project topics – has always been an essential part of the platform’s editorial
functions, which belies the alleged neutrality often associated with the platform metaphor
(Gillespie, 2010, 2017).
This chapter is based on a qualitative content analysis of one particular section on the
platform – “Tod a y’s top picks” – focusing primarily on content sources and types instead of
specifics of the content itself. This chapter also analyzes how the GA&C platform presents and
showcases objects contributed by the institutional partners, highlighting the platform’s various
aordances and examining how its interface design – which aords rather limited user
interactions – constructs an idealized user with a particular mode of cultural engagement. I
investigate GA&C’s platform aordances by comparing how one artwork is being presented in
three dierent platform environments. Throughout the chapter, I use information gathered from
the interview with the Program Manager (PM) to contextualize the discussion of these questions.
The Curatorial Function of the Platform
Chapter 4 analyzed the history of the GA&C platform – both the website and the mobile
app – and identified evidence underscoring its editorial functions since its origin, from inviting
select cultural institutions to participate in the initiative to choosing certain topics as featured
projects. While it is often unclear from the platform itself how the GA&C team is internally
structured or how some of the content decisions were made behind the scenes, the interview
with the PM provided important insights into the initiative’s organizational structure and decision-
making processes.
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In addition to the Director, the GA&C team includes several functional teams. The Content
team includes Program Managers who often serve as country/region managers, Coordinators who
manage the day-to-day partner relationships on the ground and are typically contractors rather
than Google employees, and an editorial team that works (with partner institutions) on content
creation. The Engineering team includes Product Managers that focus on specific features or
functions of the platform (e.g., games or the mobile app), often in collaboration with Developers
and Engineers, who are Google employees but may not work 100% for the Arts & Culture team.
There is also a Marketing team in charge of outreach eorts, including managing the initiative’s
social media accounts. Finally, the Paris-based Lab is a place for the technology and creative
communities to work together on solutions for cultural institutions or playful experiences for the
users.
In addition to the initial 17 partners that were exclusively invited by Google to join the Art
Project, there are currently two ways for cultural institutions to join the platform. Since late 2012
(a date confirmed using the Wayback Machine), non-profit cultural institutions can sign up to
become a partner through an application form that collects (increasingly) detailed information
about the organization (Google, 2020). When asked what eligibility criteria the GA&C team takes
into account when reviewing these applications, the PM responded:
We don’t discriminate on who can join the platform. If you are a cultural nonprofit with
stories to tell and a collection to share, then you’re welcome to join. We do only work with
not-for-profit institutions, but it’s a very visual platform, so a children’s museum, for
example, is a not-for-profit institution, but they might not be the best fit for the platform
because they don’t necessarily have images. It’s not necessarily that you have to be a
collecting institution, but there does need to be some form of images.
Central to our [review] process is that they’re nonprofit, that they do have that
collection to share, and that they understand this can’t be all about sponsors, shouting
out, or things like that. We don’t want super foul language and oensive things. We try to
keep it neutral and educational. For example, there was a museum of cannabis that we’re
not quite sure about. We reached out to learn more, but they never got back to us.
Additionally, the PM confirmed that they do work with government agencies, including the U.S.
Department of State on preservation projects overseas, as well as for-profit galleries if they have a
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non-profit branch (e.g., Hauser & Wirth Contemporary & Modern Art Gallery) that does not
include merchandise or sponsorship information in their contribution to the platform.
Two content preferences emphasized by the PM are worth mentioning. First, the focus on
visual images echoes the experience, sometimes a gradual realization, of several interviewees
that their institution, whose collection mostly contains archival documents or amateur footage,
may not be the ideal candidate for the platform because they do not necessarily have the kind of
images expected by the platform. In other words, despite the convergence of dierent types of
cultural institutions on GA&C, the platform still has a clear and perhaps lingering preference for
still images typically found in art museums and cultural heritage sites. Second, despite the claim
of neutrality, the PM used the museum of cannabis as an example of “oensive things.” This
comment tracks with the play-it-safe curatorial strategy of the platform that usually prioritizes
celebratory over provocative content. For example, in the week following the death of former
Queen Elizabeth II, GA&C’s entire homepage featured a decidedly glorious portrayal of the queen
and the royal family,19 with no reference whatsoever to all the controversies surrounding the
British monarchy that one might expect from a more self-reflective exhibition curated by a history
museum.
As each country/region lead (again, usually a PM), along with the coordinators they
manage, reviews applications only from within that particular country/region, the amount of time
it takes for the GA&C team to review partner applications can vary from country to country.
According to the PM, most of the GA&C team is split between London (where the Director is
based) and Paris (where the Lab is located), whereas the U.S. satellite team only has one full-time
employee and a small team of three coordinators. As a result, it would often take a very long time
for a U.S.-based institution to hear back from the GA&C team after submitting an application.
While not one of the individuals interviewed for the study, a sta member from one U.S.-based
non-profit organization focusing on American history reached out to me and suggested that they
had submitted an application but had been waiting for a response for more than eight weeks.
When asked about the review process, the PM admitted:
19 See https://web.archive.org/web/20220910135231/https://artsandculture.google.com.
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I’m going to be transparent that it’s long, and that’s because we are such, such, such a
small team. I cannot exaggerate the number of projects and competing priorities that we
have going on, and unfortunately reviewing new applicants is not always the top priority. If
we have a project launch, we need to make sure that that launches smoothly. I would love
to have a team member dedicated solely to reviewing the applicants and getting back to
them within a few weeks, a few days even! But yes, it can take a long time, especially
during the pandemic!20
According to the PM, cultural institutions that actively sought to join the platform are
internally referred to as “long-tail partners,” as opposed to “project partners,” which were initially
invited by the GA&C team to join the platform because they may be a good fit for a special project
that the team is working on.21 The PM provided one specific example for an upcoming project:
For example, we are launching in May a project celebrating America’s Chinatowns. We are
working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and 15 or 16 local Chinatown
organizations on the ground, such as the Museum of Chinese in America and the Center
for Asian American Media [CAAM] in San Francisco. We reached out to CAAM because
they seem like a great fit. They’re not a partner, but they would be an amazing contributor
to this Chinatown project. Once you’re a partner, you can continue using the platform as
little or as much as you want. There’s really no expectation on our end.
When asked about the internal decision-making process for coming up with project topics,
especially the role played by GA&C team members, the PM continued:
Ultimately, it’s our director, but also every country manager, [who are] in constant
conversation with our partners, always doing research on what’s happening in the [arts
and culture] ecosystem and trying to understand what would be relevant and impactful,
what is something that would both align with ecosystem priorities and Google priorities,
what are ways that we can uniquely be helpful, because we don’t do everything.
For example, the National Trust for Historic Preservation was the one who brought
this topic to us and said, “We think this is important, gentrification is happening
everywhere, these Chinatowns are being lost, and it’s an important preservation project to
talk about how important they are to immigrant culture and American culture.” We always
20 The platform’s FAQ page for institutional partners includes the question, “How quickly could our content become
published on the Google Arts & Culture website?” Since as early as 2015, the answer had always been “as quick as
1-2 months,” but it was changed to “as quick as a few months” sometime between July 2021 and January 2022,
based on the limited pages archived by the Wayback Machine.
21 These special projects are called Themes. As of April 2024, there are 200 themes featured on the platform. See
https://artsandculture.google.com/project.
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have these big projects for heritage months, so it made a lot of sense for us. We’re able to
also align it with a big cultural moment, Asian-American Heritage month in May.
In that case, a lot of it really comes from conversations with our partners. Or, if I
come up with an idea about, say, a retrospective on a certain artist, I talk to someone
who’s an expert on the artist. If they say this is not that relevant right now, or it’s already
been done, or people aren’t interested, then we’ll move on to something else.
In essence, what the PM described is a two-pronged approach to decide the topic of
upcoming projects. Institutional partners may reach out to the GA&C team and suggest a topic, or
GA&C director and managers may suggest topics and (ideally) discuss them with experts from
partner institutions. On the one hand, this decision-making process does demonstrate certain
degree of respect for domain expertise, as well as the mechanisms for communication and
collaboration between the platform and its complementors when it comes to content creation. It
is, apparently and fortunately, not based on what is popular in terms of engagement metrics and
could draw the attention of users (and therefore advertisers), as is the case with so many digital
platforms. On the other hand, as the interviews with institutional partners confirmed (in the next
chapter), this communication process could be uneven, often unilateral, and heavily contingent
on the availability and resources of specific coordinators on the ground, as well as personal or
professional networks that could help partners deliver their message to the GA&C team’s
decision makers.
What the PM did not quite clarify was the supposed alignment between “ecosystem
priorities” and “Google priorities.” On a macro level, it might be useful to mention that, on the
oicial Google blog site, Arts & Culture is listed on the Outreach and Initiatives page, along with
14 other topics such as Digital Wellbeing, Small Business, and Sustainability,22 which can be
regarded as some of Google’s publicly proclaimed priorities. On the content level, the featured
project placed at the top of the Themes page is called “Virtual Museum Day Out,” highlighting the
Pocket Gallery feature with navigable tours in 3D virtual spaces. Another example would be Play
with Google Arts & Culture, which started as just another project (as noted in Chapter 4) and was
later promoted as a dedicated section of the platform that features games and playful
experiences. Showcasing proprietary technologies developed by the wider company that are
22 See https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives.
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applied to the arts and culture context, these technology-oriented, as opposed to content-driven,
projects also indicate the priorities that the GA&C team has to take into account when deciding
the topic of special projects.
Today ’s Top Picks: The Platform as Content Creator
Despite the rhetoric and self-proclamation of digital platforms as a mere facilitator for
individual and institutional users to create and share their own content, the decision-making
process on the part of the GA&C team goes beyond mere facilitation. Rather, they actively review
partner applications and, more pertinent to the platform’s curatorial function, choose topics for
upcoming special projects. Although various members of the GA&C team have played an
important part in this project development process, they typically do not create any content in a
direct or authorial manner. In this section, I examine the “Today ’s top picks” (TTP) section of the
platform to demonstrate the ways in which the GA&C team engages in the content creation
process on a much more direct and granular level.
The TTP section was first introduced in August 2020 and consistently placed at the very
top of the homepage of the GA&C website for almost two years. As its name suggests, the section
is updated on a nearly daily basis and usually includes five title-card style images linked to
individual items, stories, projects, games, or embedded YouTube videos. As I argued in the
Methods chapter, using such words as “top” and “pick” is a deliberate design and semantic
choice by the GA&C team that epitomizes and literalizes the platform’s curatorial and editorial
functions. The PM confirmed that:
We have an editorial team that builds those pages, and they’re not built by an algorithm or
anything. I’m not sure exactly what their background is, but they’re based in the UK. The
team is very close to all the new content that’s coming out, like new experiments and
games, and they try to showcase a diversity of content, they try to pull stu from around
the world, including natural history, street art, food, dance, things that are not just painting
or sculptures. The same goes for other sections on the homepage, like “Today in history”
and “Collection of the day.”
Without direct access to the decision-making processes of this editorial team, I instead
focused on the result of its editorial interventions by analyzing these “top picks” on an aggregate
level. For this section, I collected these (mostly) five daily URLs using the Wayback Machine for
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the period between August 11 of 2020 to December 31 of 2021, with a total number of 2,485
links.23 For each linked page, I first collected the information about the content creator, defined as
below depending on the content type:
• Items: the collecting or exhibiting institution
• Stories: the institution listed in the byline
• Projects: excluded from analysis due to its collaborative nature
• Games: the GA&C platform itself
• YouTube videos: the channel owner
Then, I gathered information about the country in which each creator, as defined above, is located
and tallied the total number both over the entire 17-month period and by month to demonstrate
which types of content and creators from which countries have been most frequently promoted
on the platform’s front page.
The breakdown of the 2,485 pages in terms of content type is as follows (Figure 15): 1,248
stories (blue), 503 games and experiments (red), 387 YouTube videos (green), 168 individual
items (brown), 141 projects (yellow), 27 search by color or time (gray), 7 Street Views, and 4
artists.24 The overall dominance of the “story” format suggests that the TTP section has been used
by the GA&C’s editorial team to highlight the platform’s storytelling features, which are online
exhibitions that allow, ideally and supposedly, institutional partners to deep dive into particular
topics using the platform’s various features. The centrality of storytelling is followed by the
promotion of engaging content formats such as interactive games, playful experiences, and
(short) videos, which has been a rising trend especially on the GA&C mobile app. In contrast,
individual items and special projects – the bulk of what partners have contributed – have only
occasionally been promoted in the TTP section.
23 Data from the following dates are missing because no webpages were archived using the Wayback Machine:
August 7, August 11, and December 8 of 2021.
24 Promoted on the same day (October 27 of 2021), the four artists were Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith
Haring, and Salvador Dalí.
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Figure 15. Breakdown of TTP by content type.
It may be useful to mention that for an interested institution to join the platform, it now
needs to have at least one story ready to publish before the launch of its landing page. It is unclear
when exactly this requirement started, but based on the interviews with the 20 partners, it was
more than likely in the late 2010s since institutions that joined the platform in the initial rounds
were not required to create any story before the partnership began. This transition from objects to
storytelling was confirmed by another interviewee, who recalled their communication with the
GA&C team between late 2016 and early 2017:
The wording in the emails started to be about [stories]. They started to use the word
“exhibitions,” which they hadn’t at the beginning. The beginning was focused more on
objects, and then it transitioned to the idea of exhibitions. The last few emails were
mentioning the topic of exhibitions, but nothing was ever explained. You had to extract this
information and pay attention to the terminologies.
Regardless of the exact timing, the current minimum requirements to upload 50 items and create
one story at the beginning of the partnership corroborates the argument that the platform has
stories 50%
games 20%
videos 16%
items 7%
projects 6% search 1%
“Today’s top picks” Breakdown by Content Type
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increasingly been intended by the GA&C team to be used as a storytelling tool, among other
things.
Who then has been telling the stories featured in the TTP section? The 2,485 picks were
authored by 273 creators from 38 countries. First of all, these 273 institutions only accounted for
about 10% of the platform’s total partners worldwide. Not including GA&C itself, the 10 most
frequently featured institutional creators, mostly large and state-funded institutions, were:
• State Darwin Museum (Russia, 1.73%)
• National Park Service (U.S., 1.33%)
• CyArk (U.S., 1.29%)
• NASA (U.S., 1.18%)
• UNESCO (1.10%)
• The National Gallery, London (UK, 0.71%)
• CAAC - The Jean Pigozzi Collection (N/A, 0.63%)
• National Air and Space Museum (U.S., 0.59%)
• Sydney Opera House (Australia, 0.55%)
• Centre Pompidou (France, 0.55%)
More importantly, belying the rhetoric that the GA&C platform is simply providing tools for
its institutional partners to use and share their own collections, many stories were in fact created,
as the byline indicates, “By Google Arts & Culture” using content uploaded by partner institutions
(Figure 16). The complete breakdown of the top creators is shown in Figure 17. Notably, the
platform itself directly authored 38% of the content in the TTP section, which included stories and
videos, while another 22% (GA&C*) was indirect contribution of the platform in the form of games
and experiments enabled by Google’s own technologies. The 272 actual institutional partners
only accounted for 34% of the featured content. This overwhelming presence of the platform
itself – supported by its UK-based editorial team – as an actual and frequent content creator has
further demonstrated its essential editorial function, as well as the level of granularity in terms of
content creation on a daily basis.
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Figure 16. A typical story layout, with title, description, and name of the creator.
Figure 17. Breakdown of TTP by content creator. N/A refers to projects with multiple contributors.
GA&C 38%
GA&C* 22%
N/A 6%
“Today’s Top Picks” Breakdown by Creator
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This, however, was not always the case. One interviewee from an institution that joined
the original Art Project in 2012 shed some light on the reservation the platform had in terms of
creating content on its own:
There was an art historian that was working with them around 2012 and 2013, and she
was talking about the idea that they really didn’t want to create content on their end
because it would blur the line. They wanted to be an aggregate of content from museums
around the world. If they started creating content on their own, then that might first of all
set a precedent that museums would expect them to create content. Also, they’re
presenting themselves as this neutral third party that’s just presenting things as a
platform, and if the platform starts creating content, that gets messy.
This recollection directly referenced the platform metaphor as a mere neutral facilitator. It is
unclear for how long the GA&C team, or at least some of its contractors with actual art historical
expertise, tried to maintain the platform’s aggregator identity, but as the TTP section has
demonstrated, the line – if it ever existed at all – between content creator and neutral third-party
aggregator has long been eviscerated.
In addition to the overwhelming presence of the platform itself, there has also been a clear
regional preference, however unintentional, for content featured in the TTP section. Not including
content created by GA&C’s editorial team, Figure 18 shows the distribution of creators based on
their country of origin. By far, institutions based in the U.S. have been most frequently featured
(approximately 24%) as top picks, followed by those from the UK (11%), France (5%), Australia
(5%), Russia (5%), Germany (4%), Nigeria (3%), Netherlands (2%), Japan (2%), Italy (2%), Mexico
(2%), India (2%), and South Africa (2%). The other 25 countries each accounted for only 1% or
less of the TTP section. When asked about the possible over-representation of U.S.-based
institutions within TTP, the GA&C PM attributed that to the large number of these U.S. institutions
on the platform to begin with:
I would say that reflects the partners on the platform. It’s an interesting thing about US tax
law, and it’s very easy to set up a nonprofit in the US, which has tons and tons of tiny
museums, like the Virginia Quilt Museum or the Owls Head Transportation Museum in
Maine. […] Once you’re on the platform, then the editorial team will loop you onto the
page. So yes, I would say that’s reflective of the large number of US partners that we have.
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Incidentally, the percentage of U.S.-based institutions on the platform (approximately 25%) is
indeed close to their appearances in the TTP section. Nonetheless, rather than everyone simply
being “looped onto the page” after joining the platform, about 90% of the partner institutions
worldwide were never featured in this section.
More importantly, should the editorial team reflect (and therefore reinforce) such existing
over-representation, or should it attempt to proactively recreate some balance in terms of
regional representation? When asked this exact question, the PM responded:
I can’t comment on their strategy, and they have their own goals. […] The program
managers from other countries work hard at getting more content on the platform, and we
know that it’s not reflective of the world to have more U.S. partners on the platform. It’s
also a lift to join the platform, it is work on the partner side of things. It’s oftentimes
smaller organizations, or maybe there’re not as many museums around the world, but it’s
a question of the program managers trying to help and support and get as much on the
platform as possible.
Finally, it might be helpful to examine the distribution by country over the entire 17-month
data-collection period. In Figure 19, content created by the editorial team (GA&C) and games
developed by Google (GA&C*) are added to the graph in order to better reflect the overall
composition of the section. Not only does this longitudinal distribution attest to the persistence
and centrality of the platform’s editorial function over time, but the very creation of the TTP
section, at least within the first 8 months, serves as a curatorial spotlight that showcases the
platform’s proprietary technologies more than the content provided by its institutional partners. It
is also important to note that the eventual dwindling of GA&C* in the graph was by no means a
sign of the end of the trend. Rather, it was exactly around that time – on June 30 of 2021, to be
precise – when a dedicated “Play” tab was added to the navigation bar on the platform’s
homepage, thus obviating the promotion of playful experiences among its daily top picks. Indeed,
whenever new games or interactive features were introduced by the platform, they would
sometimes be featured in the TTP section again, if not being promoted at the top of the homepage
with a full-width banner.
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Figure 18. Breakdown of TTP by country. N/A refers to projects with multiple contributors.
Figure 19. TTP content distribution by country over time. See Appendix B for all countries featured.
United States 24%
N/A 20%
United Kingdom 11%
France 5%
Australia 5%
Russia 5%
Germany 4%
Nigeria 3%
“Today’s Top Picks” Breakdown by Country
GA&C
GA&C* United States
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
“Today’s Top Picks” Distribution by Country over Time
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The Platform as an Interface Regime
The previous two sections provided empirical evidence about the editorial and curatorial
functions performed by the platform, especially how the program managers are actively involved
in the processes of deciding the topics of collaborative projects with the input of institutional
partners, as well as how the editorial team utilizes content contributed by institutional partners to
create and promote content – stories, videos, and experiences – in one recurring section of the
platform’s homepage. In addition to these content creation and curatorial processes, the
presentation of cultural content on GA&C, especially individual items, is also conditioned by the
design and functional elements of the platform’s interface architecture. I illustrate this process by
comparing how one artwork – The Milkmaid (1660) by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer – is
displayed on three dierent websites: GA&C, Rijksmuseum, where the painting is located, and
Europeana, an EU-supported digital cultural heritage platform (Figures 20a-c). Again, I use this
seventeen-century painting as an example because it has long been in the public domain and is
therefore copyright-free. The two European hosting institutions also provide a counterpart to
GA&C in terms of both the interface design and the operating philosophy, especially regarding
open access, underlying the respective web environment.
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Figure 20a. The Milkmaid on Google Arts & Culture.
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Figure 20b. The Milkmaid on Rijksmuseum.
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Figure 20c. The Milkmaid on Europeana.
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The three web interfaces share some common functions and design elements, such as an
image at a central position with the possibility to zoom in, basic information about the artwork
with a short narrative introduction, metadata fields about technical details of the artwork and its
collecting institution, the option to interact with the image in some ways, and the links to related
content hosted on the platform. The presence of web elements like names and labels (i.e.,
cognitive aordances) and their visibility and legibility (i.e., sensory aordances) facilitate the
user’s information processing and meaning making processes when they see and interact with the
web interface, which allows the user to perform some action (i.e., physical aordances) in order
to ultimately fulfill certain goal (i.e., functional aordances), regardless of whether that use is
intended by the interface designer or not (Hartson, 2003). That intended use, as Stanfill (2015)
argued, both reflects and reinforces social logics and cultural norms built into the design of the
web interface.
What, then, is the intended use of the three web interfaces and in what ways, if any, are
their embedded logics and norms dierent from each other? One dierence resides in the types
of interaction with the image the platform aords users. While all three websites allow the users
to view, zoom in, add to favorites, and share the image on social media, the download option is
available on the museum website and Europeana but is conspicuously missing on GA&C. For the
Rijksmuseum, users with a Rijksstudio account can make a print of a detailed view of the image,
download and use the image to create their own product, or order a poster of the work (Figure 21).
The downloaded image is in JPEG format with an average resolution of 4,500 by 4,500 pixels. The
possibility to download an image is indicated by the download button and the Rijksstudio’s
scissors icon, both placed at visibly prominent parts of the page that users could easily perceive
and understand. Without using phrases such as “copy-right free” or “public domain,” the museum
simply describes these objects as “digitally accessible, free of charge.” Regardless, the option to
download an image and the museum’s prominent messages to encourage public reuse
demonstrates none other than the kind of “read/write” or remix culture championed by scholars
such as Lessig and Gauntlett. Thus, the intended use of the website highlights the promotion of
creative reuse by the public, which is aligned with the museum’s well-established reputation for
and commitment to open data and open access (Pekel, 2014).
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Figure 21. The download option provided by Rijksmuseum.
The Europeana website also includes a download option – although the image file is about
half the resolution of that oered by the Rijksmuseum – along with a Public Domain Mark that
explains what users can do with the image (Figure 22). This mark is also linked to Creative
Commons (a nonprofit organization providing open licenses and legal tools for creators to share
their works with the public), which provides a detailed explanation of the Public Domain Mark and
what the public can do with images marked as such. In addition to this formal, if not legalistic,
annotation regarding the reuse of the image, the Europeana interface does not suggest or
encourage any particular ways of creative reuse in the way the Rijksmuseum does. Therefore, the
intended use suggested by this interface design is one that allows for creative reuse, but does so
not only to promote user engagement and open access but also to comply with and advocate
data standards and rights management practices for the cultural sector, something that is aligned
with the mission and established reputation of Europeana as an organization (Capurro & Plets,
2020; Thylstrup, 2019).
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Figure 22. The download option provided by Europeana.
By comparison, what does the absence of content downloadability on GA&C reveal about
the platform’s intended use and embedded norms? Following the prolonged lawsuits in the early
2010s from publishers and authors about the Google Books project, it is not unreasonable to
speculate that the interface was designed to minimize the risk of copyright infringement. As one
interviewee who has worked with the GA&C platform at several partner institutions commented:
At that time, the Google Art Project was only accepting works that were out of copyright,
even though we had the permission from the rights holders of more contemporary works. I
think they were still trying to prove out the platform itself and had decided what areas to
not get bogged down in. I think one of those was rights management. […] They probably
learned their lesson from the Google Books project.
Whether or not it was indeed related to the legal quagmire of Google Books, this particular
design choice was nonetheless conceived of by Google as a rights protection mechanism. This
was outlined in the “Content Hosting Services” section of one particular version of the partner
agreement:
2.7 Content Protection. Google will not oer any features designed to enable Users to
download Platform Content from the Platform.25
25 An earlier version of the agreement specified that “Google will not oer any features designed to enable Users to
download the 3D Models, Cultural Assets, or Gigapixel Images from the Platform.” This language was later changed to
“Platform Content” as defined at the beginning of the agreement.
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The prohibition of downloading content as a protection measure of the platform was also
confirmed by the PM, who also considered it a gesture of reassurance on the part of Google when
they initially reached out to cultural institutions at a time when the sector at large was not quite
receptive to the idea of presenting their collections online:
There’re also image protections in place, so you can’t download an image, as I’m sure
you’ve noticed, and if you try to print a page, it prints blank. That was important to the
museum partners. I don’t think that we would have been able to convince people to put
images online, especially 10-15 years ago, when people thought if you put images online,
people won’t want to come and see them in person! You can never replace an in-person
visit to an institution, and that would never be our goal. I think people have stopped
thinking that as much.
These content protection measures extend beyond the omission of a download button
from the interface or the disabling of webpage printing. The commonly used right-click command
(or similar mouse/keyboard operations) to show an extended menu of user actions is also
disabled throughout the entire platform. In other words, the physical aordance of performing a
right-click is disabled to prevent the fulfillment of functional aordances, such as saving, printing,
and inspecting the page. What is allowed then is a narrower set of user actions that prioritizes,
again in Lessig’s and Gauntlett’s terms, read-only over read-write and sit-back-and-be-told over
making-and-doing culture. The intended use of the interface therefore prescribes and perpetuates
an idealized User with a particular mode of cultural engagement. These are the embedded
cultural norms that are reflected and reinforced through the design and implementation of the
platform’s interface architecture.
The conditioning eect of the interface, however, is not without tension and cracks. As the
PM mentioned:
For example, the MET has a huge open access collection. We actually had to change our
contract with them because they wanted a download button for that very reason. They
encourage people to download these works. If you go to the MET’s collection and click on
an image, if it’s an open access image, you will be able to download it. It’s same with the
Cleveland Museum of Art, another huge open access proponent, and you can download
their images, too.
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Incidentally, or rather necessarily, the MET and the Cleveland Museum of Art are currently the
second and ninth largest contributors of the platform, with a total of 201,173 and 35,333
uploaded items, respectively. Partly because of their essential contribution to the platform and
partly because of their institutional commitment to the principle of open access, these well-
known institutional partners have the incentive, resources, and leverage to negotiate a
customized partnership agreement so as to remain committed to the idea of open access no
matter where their collections are being displayed. In other words, the two institutions’
embedded norms of openness, as a rare exception, successfully challenged the interface-
induced logic of passive consumption implemented by the GA&C platform (Figure 23).
Figure 23. The download option for public domain images contributed by The MET.
Given the requirement for institutional partners to only contribute copyright-free or
copyright-cleared content, why does GA&C not provide a download option for all of the images in
the public domain? When asked whether Google should also promote the kind of open culture
and participatory ethos advocated by institutions such as the MET, the PM suggested that “it’s a
question of scalability in the sense that we don’t have an automated or easy way of knowing what
work is in the public domain and technically downloadable.” Setting aside the question of
scalability, however, I argue that the GA&C page essentially diers from the two European pages
in that it does not in fact present the same kind of reproduction image.
For example, clicking the download button next to The Milkmaid on Europeana will initiate
the downloading of a digital object, namely, a 4.55 megabyte JPEG file measuring 2,261 by 2,548
pixels at 300 dpi created on December 12 of 2009 with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows. This,
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undoubtedly, is a digitized image of the painting, with all its digital materialities documented in the
file’s metadata fields. What makes the “image” on display on GA&C qualitatively dierent is
evidenced in the dynamic URL. Below is a sample URL for a zoomed-in view of The Milkmaid,
broken down into multiple lines for better legibility:
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-milkmaid-johannes-
vermeer/9AHrwZ3Av6Zhjg?ms=
%7B%22x%22%3A0.3781161870862447
%2C%22y%22%3A0.5308660707116841
%2C%22z%22%3A14
%2C%22size%22%3A
%7B%22width%22%3A0.06092789267747345
%2C%22height%22%3A0.030204376921685656%7D%7D
As a user moves the cursor within the frame or zooms in and out, the dynamic URL will
change accordingly. More precisely, it is the numeric values following x, y, z, size, width, and
height that change based on the zoom level and focal position. In other words, the structure of
the dynamic URL reveals not a digital object but some three-dimensional Euclidean space in
which the position of a given point can be represented with coordinates (x, y, z). This, decidedly, is
not a digitized image of the painting, but a spatialized rendering of the reproduction image, not
unlike the zooming techniques used in Google Maps. No digital file is embedded into the interface
as an “assemblage of objects,” to use Ash’s (2015) terms, so there is, in short, simply no image to
download. While this may be an “unintentional” and technical side eect of the platform’s image
protection measures, what the interface ends up showing is not just the copyright-free content
per se, but rather one of Google’s many proprietary technologies that, perhaps ironically, remixes
the content.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that this read-only mode of user engagement has not
always been the case, and the initiative in fact encouraged and promoted user-generated content
for more than four years until its rebranding into GA&C in 2016. While users can create and share
personal galleries now, these are simply image thumbnails grouped together with no additional
information allowed. In contrast, the original Art Project and later Cultural Institute websites (see
Figure 6 and Figure 8) included a “User Galleries” section in the top navigation bar, which allowed
the public to search and browse (supposedly) all user-created galleries. Not only were texts and
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videos also allowed back then, essentially turning these user galleries into blogs (Figure 24), but
the platform also encouraged users to “try on the role of curator by creating an exhibition” and
provided a step-by-step tutorial on how to create these online exhibitions:
First you’ll need an engaging theme. It could be simple (Winter) or more complex and
conceptual (Good and Evil). It could be historical (Napoleon), topical (The City) or spiritual
(demons). Next you’ll need to determine the order in which the works of art will be
displayed. The order might be chronological or according to sub-themes (Good and Evil in
the City, Good and Evil in the Country).26
Figure 24. A user-created gallery about the Chiaroscuro technique.
Unfortunately, the archived User Galleries page does not load properly when inspected
using the Wayback Machine, so it is unclear how many galleries had been created before Google
removed the section from the navigation bar in 2016 and later disabled the addition of texts and
videos altogether. Still, searching “google.com/usergallery/” (the common path segment in the
URLs of all user-created galleries) would still retrieve at least 26 of such exhibitions, with topics
26 The About page of the Google Cultural Institute included a section on using the Art Project as an education tool. See
https://web.archive.org/web/20131212221032/http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/artproject/education
/di y.
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ranging from “Eects of Industrial Revolution to Paintings” and “Mythical Animals as Symbols in
Chinese Art” to “Mexican War Daguerreotypes” and “Ukiyo-e in the Edo Period.” Although they are
hosted on the GA&C site, searching the title on the platform would yield no matching results. It is
unclear why Google discontinued the promotion of such user-generated content or why it even
had to disable the addition of interpretative texts in the user gallery format, but the mere existence
of a previously open and participatory forum for users to create and share content suggests that
the platform must have made a deliberate decision to pivot to the current more restrictive mode
of user engagement. In retrospect, the old user gallery looks almost like the prototypical story
format later introduced for partner institutions to use. Did GA&C simply “beta test” the tool with
user-generated content before formally rolling out the storytelling feature?
Summary
This chapter addresses the ways in which content presentation on Google Arts & Culture
is conditioned both directly by the curatorial and editorial functions of the GA&C team and
indirectly through the limited aordances of the platform’s interface architecture. On a macro
level, the GA&C team’s director and program managers play a consistently central role in deciding
the topics for upcoming projects, while its editorial team has been both curating and creating
content on a daily basis, promoting content from only a small portion of the institutional partners
worldwide while prioritizing the platform’s own interactive experiences whenever needed. On a
micro level, the interface design of the individual item page aords a narrow set of user actions.
Although originally implemented as a content protection measure and gesture of reassurance to
minimize the risk of copyright infringement, the lack of a download option even for images in the
public domain (except for two large institutions), ends up prescribing and perpetuating a passive
mode of user engagement that falls short of the promises of a participatory remix culture.
Nonetheless, the ability for some institutions to renegotiate the partner agreement and
add a download option means not simply the addition of some web elements, but rather an active
attempt to circumvent the platform’s proprietary technologies used for displaying images and
directly encourage users to engage with their collection. It signals, in other words, a deliberate
resistance against the platform’s interface architecture and by extension its governance
mechanisms due to the institution’s deeply held belief in and commitment to the principle of open
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access. This is just a snippet of a larger picture about how cultural institutions use the platform
and adopt, negotiate, or resist its various tools in practice. I discuss these questions with greater
detail in the next chapter.
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Chapter 6: Unveiling Platform Use: Platform Governance Meets Institutional
Practices
In this chapter, I demonstrate how institutional partners use the Google Arts & Culture
platform on the ground and address the issue of platform governance (RQ3). As cultural
institutions established the partnership with GA&C and adopted its various boundary resources,
some of them have adapted their own institutional practices in the same process. Based on the
interviews with cultural institutions and the GA&C Program Manager (PM) as well as the analysis
of the platform’s various governance documents (i.e., partner agreements, terms of service, and
content guidelines), I demonstrate the multiple, contingent, and contested nature of platform
governance (Katzenbach & Ulbricht, 2019) and foreground the interplay between GA&C’s
governance mechanisms and the resulting institutional practices (Poell et al., 2019) that range
from adoption, negotiation, and resistance.
As noted in the Methods chapter, I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with sta
members from 23 cultural institutions. After analyzing the transcripts, I focused on three broad
categories based on the interviewees’ personal accounts:
• Background: information about the institution, including collections, digital strategies, as
well as missions and values (e.g., open access) that are important to its operations,
especially in the digital space.
• Partnership: the process of establishing the partnership, including the institution’s
perceived benefits and potential concerns about the initiative, internal decisions before
joining the platform, as well as communications with the GA&C team.
• Platform Use: the actual use of the platform’s tools and features by the institution (e.g.,
object selection and content creation) as well as the issues that have emerged – technical
or political, on the part of the platform or the institution itself – in the process of adopting
the platform’s various boundary resources.
In the following sections, I present and analyze findings of the interviews based on these
categories, with a particular focus on the establishment of the partnership and the use of the
platform. By shedding light on how institutional partners responded dierently to the
opportunities and challenges presented by the GA&C, this chapter highlights why some cultural
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institutions decided to participate while others rejected the idea of working with Google, how the
platform’s governance mechanisms – from interface design to infrastructural services – have
facilitated or, more often than not, limited its adoption on a broader scale, and how the partner
institutions’ internal working dynamics have played an important role in the process.
Why Cultural Institutions Joined Google
The interviewees’ initial reactions to the GA&C initiative or in some cases the Art Project
were a combination of excitement, intrigue, and to a lesser extent, skepticism. Many interviewees
remembered feeling excited about a then rising technology company taking interest in the
dissemination of arts and culture at a time when the idea of the digital itself was not necessarily
embraced by everyone in the museum community. Others referenced previous attempts – either
unsuccessful or limited in scope and reach (e.g., ARTstor or Bridgeman Images) – to create a
unified catalogue that is cross-collection and cross-institution. Still others considered the
initiative an opportunity, especially for smaller institutions, to share the spotlight usually reserved
for world-renowned museums. On the other hand, the skepticism was mainly centered on the
long-term viability of the initiative, rather than the mere fact that it was run by a private technology
company.
Regardless of Google’s reputation within the cultural sector in the early 2010s, the initial
reactions of the interviewees did highlight some of the perceived benefits of the partnership with
GA&C: the creation of a 1) unified portal supported by a 2) well-resourced and then reputable
technology company that would expand the 3) reach of the institution’s collections – including
accessibility and discoverability – and enrich the 4) engagement with audiences through
education and entertainment. Not only were these four aspects frequently mentioned by the
interviewees, but they also echoed the kind of technological vision that traces back to the ideal of
the virtual museum.
In terms of resources oered by the initiative, many interviewees identified specific tools
or features of the platform (i.e., boundary resources) that they hoped to use, such as the
storytelling and design tools (as opposed to building their own web pages), the ability to embed
GA&C content onto the institutional websites, and the navigable indoor spaces created using
Street View technologies. In terms of reach and engagement, several interviewees emphasized
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that they hoped that the platform would help them reach new and younger audiences who may
not be among the typical museum-going demographics. One sta member from the J. Paul Getty
Museum explained:
A lot of the reason why we’re on Google is the accessibility portion of things and reaching
a newer audience, who’re interested in art but don’t necessarily know a ton about it. We’re
making it less scholarly and easier to read and digest. The approach we take, and what we
hope to write for Google, is about an early high school level. If I get a copy deck back and
there’s a word that I can’t understand, we need to change the word.
Similarly, one sta member from the Georgia O’Keee Museum noted:
I think for scholarly use, a researcher is going to use our online collection platform and not
this platform. I think we want elementary, middle, and high school students to engage.
Maybe this is a window into O’Keee as an artist or they will visit the museum someday
because they make a fun activity in their classroom.
Overall, the perceived benefits of the partnership with the GA&C initiative boiled down to a
certain level of alignment – strategic or expedient – between what the platform had to oer and
what the institution needed at a particular point in time. Strategically, what the platform had to
oer was often in line with the institutional missions or digital strategies of a particular partner. A
former sta member of the MET emphasized Google’s reputation in the digital and technology
space:
I think we also felt that this was really a good opportunity to showcase the kind of work the
museum should be doing in regard to the digital space. Regardless of whether or not it was
going to have any dramatic impact to us, it didn’t really cost us anything to do, except our
own time and eort. Google, like the MET, carried with it the reputation as a major player in
the technology space, so there was an alignment there. […] If it hadn’t been Google, if it
had been some fly-by-night organization, we probably never would have done it, but the
name carried a lot of weight.
Other institutions aligned their mission with the digital platform as a potential outreach
opportunity. For instance, a sta member from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
explained:
Our strategic priorities are related to science and technology: innovate and build, explore
and protect, but we also have a third strategic priority that is focused on outreach: inspire
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and engage. [Google Arts & Culture] very squarely fell within that category, so we really
approached it as an opportunity to extend our reach and try out a new platform.
For institutions that had yet to develop a robust digital strategy, the platform often served as a
sandbox for them to experiment with new ways of content creation and even shaped how internal
functions were structured. As one sta member from the Georgia O’Keee Museum recalled:
I think it really started as a marketing tool, but that also fit with our museum in that we
didn’t really have an area for digital strategy. We got the initial thing done but then it didn’t
go anywhere. When I came on board and we started publishing more collection
information, we realized that it was out of date. That’s when I worked with Marketing to
pull it over to Digital Experience.
On the content level, this strategic alignment sometimes meant addressing specific needs of a
particular project, as one sta member from the Royal Ontario Museum explained:
Google Arts & Culture doesn’t do everything that we want it to do, but it does enough of
what we wanted to do that we think it’ll be a good fit, so we did. When we did this online
exhibit, it was something that only existed on Google and had a particular purpose for a
particular story that we wanted to tell. I think from all those senses, it was a success. It
wasn’t about driving traic to our website, but we wanted to, from a curatorial perspective,
tell a story in a very particular way, in a way that we couldn’t do in real life, but that was
facilitated by the Google platform.
In addition to these strategic considerations, sometimes the alignment between the
platform and institution was a matter of expediency or (un)fortunate coincidence, thanks in part to
the COVID-19 pandemic. As a former sta member from the MET described:
I think [Google’s] timing was fortunate because it happened very soon after the formation
of this digital department within the museum. When the inquiry came in, internally there
were people saying, “we have this new digital department, maybe this is something that
we should actually take a look at.”
For some institutions, the platform’s invitation coincided with the launch of media and marketing
campaigns or building renovation and shutdown. For instance, a sta member from the Harvard
Art Museums recalled:
We were physically closed for a couple of years because the museum was under
construction. We really needed to start a campaign to remind people that Harvard has a
museum that has a notable art collection, and a new museum building will be opening in a
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year and a half. Part of the internal conversation and decisions revolved around the
question of where we want to invest our energy for marketing purposes. On the curatorial
side, what’s going to make us look good, what’s going to draw people in, what is the
noteworthy stu we really want to show o? Those two things weighed heavily in our
decision-making process.
For many institutions that joined the platform but had not devoted many resources into uploading
or creating content, the pandemic provided an external impetus for them to take stock of their
digital toolkit. As a sta member from the Getty Museum recalled:
In 2019, [Google] approached us, talking about using the platform more, but nothing ever
really happened with it. It was when the pandemic hit that we thought, “oh, we have this
dissemination tool that reaches a lot more people than we reach alone. We should
probably attempt to use this somehow.” It was dormant for a couple of years before we
even really started doing anything.
The Harvard Art Museums shared a similar story about one particular exhibition:
We did put up the four stories there because it’s an online version of a physical exhibition
that we mounted just before Covid and the shutdown. […] Our exhibition designer did a lot
of work on the physical environment for the show and wanted to make sure that it didn’t
get lost in our history, so he really pushed to make these stories as a digital version of the
exhibit, and he did it! […] He designed the exhibition, he did the work on this virtual
exhibition, and he was very keen on using this story feature for future exhibitions, but it
unfortunately didn’t stick, and other people weren’t interested enough to warrant investing
the time.
So, why did cultural institutions decide to work with the GA&C platform? Despite the
unique situations in each organization, the comments above indicated a shared need among the
cultural institutions for infrastructural resources to establish or strengthen their presence in the
digital space through the creation of a unified catalogue in order to expand their reach beyond the
physical space and enrich the engagement with broader audiences. While this need signaled an
ideal (i.e., the promises of the virtual museum) that the larger community has always aspired to
achieve, in reality it was the alignment – strategic or expedient – between what the institution
needed and what the platform had to oer that motivated the institutions to actually start using
the platform. As was the experience with the Harvard Art Museums, this alignment was often so
contingent on institutional factors that, for most of the institutions interviewed, it turned out to be
a temporary arrangement that “unfortunately didn’t stick.” In the following sections, I discuss
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some of these contextual factors that prevented the adoption and (continued) use of the platform
for some cultural institutions.
The Ones that Got Away: Where Platform Boundaries End
As I discussed in Chapter 4, the GA&C team internally distinguishes between long-tail
partners and project partners. The former typically makes an application to join the platform and
uses it as part of the institution’s overall digital strategy, whereas the latter often establishes its
presence on the platform by being invited to contribute to a particular project initiated by the
GA&C team. Interviewees from 10 dierent institutions recalled that Google first reached out to
their institution to initiate the partnership. Some of them joined the platform at an early stage
when special projects were not available (e.g., National Gallery of Art, Harvard Art Museums, and
Philadelphia Museum of Art), whereas others recalled being contacted because of a specific
project (e.g., Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Münchner Stadtmuseum, and Harry
Ransom Center). Five institutions mentioned that they reached out to Google to initiate the
partnership. These proactive eorts usually occurred in the early years of the Art Project with
individual sta members who were familiar with the museum technology community and had
been keeping a close eye on the initiative’s early development. One sta member from the
Walters Art Museum recalled:
There was a lot of talk in places like the Museum Computer Network about the [Art
Project] when it happened. Our team took a real interest in that because we had already
put a substantial online collection together, and we were beginning to get curious about
how to make it portable to other platforms.
Another interviewee who was working for the Denver Art Museum around 2011 recalled:
It was still invite-only even in the second round if I recall correctly. We were not part of that
invite at first, and then I reached out. […] I think we made the pitch very hard because
Denver had a very significant native arts collection, and there were no other organizations
at that point present in the project that represented those kinds of collection and objects
to any significant degree, so we had a really good contribution to make. To their credit,
Google immediately said, “yes, definitely, let’s talk!”
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Overall, however, many interviewees were not part of the decision making process, or even with
the organization at all, when their institution joined the platform, so the institutional memory was
fragmented and patchy at best as to how their partnership truly unfolded.
Two institutions that did provide a detailed recount of their communication and
negotiation processes eventually decided not to join the platform. I use these two institutions –
The Mesoamerica Center and Harry Ransom Center, both ailiated with the University of Texas at
Austin – as well as their “failed” partnerships with GA&C as two edge cases to demonstrate some
of the contextual factors that prevented the adoption of the platform and, by extension, the
operating limitations of the platform’s governance mechanisms.
The Mesoamerica Center: The Promise That Was Not
The Mesoamerica Center was drawn to the Art Project with one specific feature in mind:
3D scanning. According to the assistant director (AD), they approached the Dallas Museum of Art
(DMA), which had worked with the Google team to create 3D images for several objects from
South America, hoping to establish a partnership with Google to create 3D images for their own
collections. The AD reached out to the Google team in late 2015. As they recalled:
That’s the whole reason I got involved with Google Cultural Institute at the time. Here, we
had maybe the lab with the tech capacity to scan, but we didn’t have the resources or sta
to do all the scanning, turn the scans into 3D objects, post them somewhere with enough
server size, and all of that kind of stu. I thought, if they did it for the DMA, maybe they’d do
it for us. Even if it was just a sample or set it up so that we could then keep going.
However, this request for technical support with 3D images was never really fulfilled. As the AD
continued:
I think my big frustration in the end was that there were a lot of emails back and forth, and
it was right at the transition from Google Cultural Institute and the World of Art, or
whatever they were called, to Arts & Culture. In that transition, they kept handing me over
to another person. […] I have one person literally saying, “I am now the person to
communicate with, so and so is doing something else, and I’m here to help you.” And then,
I would get another person and then I would get another person. All in the scope of less
than a year, I was handed o to four dierent people, with dierent titles every time. It
seemed that every time they weren’t really answering my questions.
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That was exactly the phase of reorganization and transition for Google. In the
process of doing that, I think they reduced what they were giving to cultural entities on
their end. In other words, all the tech knowhow of coming to a place to scan objects and
sending a physical person to do that was probably eliminated, and all they provided was a
platform, or what they called the “dashboard,” a publishing interface. It ultimately ended
up seeming like I would have to photograph or scan everything on my end. That was the
whole reason I wanted Google to do it. I didn’t need them to really provide this interface. I
felt like if they digitize things, then in exchange I’ll put them on their interface and make
them publicly accessible.
The experience of the Mesoamerica Center, especially the communication process it
underwent to establish the partnership, highlighted several issues that other institutions similarly
encountered. First, the AD was well aware of the tradeo involved in such a partnership with
private companies. The Center was specifically seeking support in the technological knowhow,
digital infrastructure, and human capacities around the creation and presentation of 3D images. In
return, it was willing to share the images on the platform. This realization, or anticipation, of a
tradeo was clearly articulated by many other interviewees as well. The problem in the case of
the Center was that the exact terms of the partnership were not clear to the AD until the chair of
the department, to which the Center belongs, signed the partner agreement.
That led to the second issue. As the AD found out only after the department had signed
the agreement, the amount of support Google was able to provide fell short of what the Center
had expected, or, if one were to take GA&C’s mission statement at face value, what the platform
has always promised. The AD speculated on the correlation between the Art Project’s transition
to Arts & Culture in 2016 and the drastic reduction, if not elimination, of some services the
platform had originally provided or promised for earlier partners. It might be impossible to confirm
the causality between everything that was happening around the transition period in 2016, but the
limitation on the part of the Arts & Culture team to provide digitization services on a systematic
and consistent scale was nonetheless confirmed by the PM:
We do digitize, but again it’s a question of bandwidth, because we’re a small team with
limited resources. Honestly, at the end of the day, I would love it if we could digitize every
institution that came to us, and this is where I think the misconception comes in, that we
have all of Google’s budget on hand to send photographers and scanners, which we don’t.
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The third issue, likely related to the small GA&C team, was the lack of eective or
consistent communication to facilitate the maintenance of partnerships with cultural institutions.
Again, the PM revealed that the U.S. team consists of only one full-time employee and three
contractors as coordinators charged with managing the day-to-day communications with the
partners. These coordinators would have been the ones who were interfacing with the Center. As
the AD recalled:
Looking back now, when you look at these emails [from Google], they read like as if you
were having a conversation with a bot. They sound very much like that. I got to the point
where I questioned if I was really interacting with the person that was assigned to our
collection, or if it was just whoever was signing o on emails that were automatically
generated or something that felt not very personalized.
The frustration with sta turnover on the part of GA&C and the resulting lack of eective
communication was not an isolated issue. As another interviewee recalled:
I worked with someone at Google to get them connected to [our API] and to make sure
that we had mapped that data correctly. Then, that guy just left the project, which is what
happens with Google all the time! In the course of less than two years, we went through
six dierent contacts for our account before we even got the partnership live! It’s been
crazy! All of a sudden, we just get a random email from someone saying, “How are things
going?” And I thought, “Who are you? What happened to [name]? Who’s this person?”
There was no account management, no hando, and no customer service in terms of it
being a partnership you might have with other types of organizations!
Other interviewees, while not feeling as frustrated, also mentioned similar situations where their
dedicated contact person from the GA&C team was replaced with a generic email address,
especially since the beginning of the pandemic.
In the end, due to the lack of resources, both internally and from Google, needed to 3D
scan the collection, the Mesoamerica Center never launched its landing page on GA&C.
Nonetheless, the partner agreement had already been signed and even has an auto-renewal
clause. Since a notice of non-renewal was never provided by either side, the Center, despite
having no visible presence on the platform, is technically still a partner institution and has
therefore been receiving partner updates regularly.
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Harry Ransom Center: Conditioned Visibility
If the experience of The Mesoamerica Center exemplified some of the limitations of what
the platform had to oer for a long-tail partner, then the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) was sucked
into a month-long logistical whirlpool as an unwilling project partner. Best known for its collection
of literary manuscripts, HRC is a university-ailiated museum and archive that also holds, among
other things, three paintings by artist Frida Kahlo. In the fall of 2017, HRC’s marketing and
communications team received a cold call from GA&C with a request for participation in an
upcoming retrospective project about the Frida Kahlo. In a group interview with several HRC sta
members, interviewee #1 recalled:
We get requests all the time for high-resolution digital images of our collection. […] It’s the
sort of thing we do all the time: the request is in, a person or organization gets the
permissions from the intellectual property owner, we provide copies of images, and they
move forward. It seemed at first as if this was one of those requests, which was why it
was a little frustrating that it morphed into this other kind of conversation. It felt a little bit
like a bait and switch.
They wanted us to participate in this multi-institutional Frida Kahlo project, but
they said, “As a condition of your participation, you have to submit 50 works of art and
create a portal on the Google Arts & Culture platform.” That was the sticking point for us.
We were not prepared to select 50 objects, describe them, digitize them, and make them
accessible to Google on their platform.
Interviewee #2 provided more context for the request:
We were happy to contribute the images of our three Frida Kahlo works to this larger
project, but the condition of that participation was that we had to create this larger
presence on Google Arts & Culture, and we had to do it within less than a month. It was a
very, very short turnaround time that they were requesting, and given all of the internal
priorities we had, that just didn’t align. […] As far as institutional priorities are concerned, it
was a priority for them that didn’t align in the same way as a priority for us.
Echoing the misalignment of institutional priorities, interviewee #1 added:
I also tried to emphasize in my conversations with the Coordinator at Google that our
institutional priorities are not aligned with their work. The institutional services that we
provide are very much in alignment with their goal of publishing artwork on the Internet.
We can make those images available in a day, not an issue, but to devote sta time,
energy, and real funds to a project that is not driven by campus needs, not driven by
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researcher needs, it just didn’t make sense. We would be happy to treat them like any
other customer seeking access to our images, but nobody else says I’d like three, but give
me 50, or I won’t take the three! It’s just a ludicrous business proposition!
In addition to the scope of participation, the terms of collaboration were another issue for
HRC. As interviewee #2 recalled:
We had diiculty with our standard agreements or even getting them to complete our
notification of intent to publish documents, which they refused to do because they already
had in place some overarching agreement with the University of Texas. They said, “well,
there’s already an agreement with you, so you don’t need to sign anything.” I believe they
did eventually show us the agreement. It was clear that it was with the university at large,
and we fell under that governance, but we didn’t participate in that documentation
process at all.
The internal email records shared by HRC sta members showed several rounds of
communications with the GA&C representatives about how to include the three paintings without
HRC fully participating on the platform. In the end, HRC insisted that they would only share the
three images and said it would otherwise not participate in the project at all. Google eventually
accepted that oer, included the images in the project, and created a landing page for HRC
nonetheless.27 However, among the list of 31 institutions credited for the project, HRC was not
one of them. Moreover, searching for “Harry Ransom Center” on the platform would yield no
matching results, and users have to first locate the project or one of the three paintings to even
arrive at HRC’s landing page. When asked about HRC’s conditioned visibility, so to speak, on the
platform, the GA&C PM said they were not sure why the search results are the way they are, but
attributed that to the maintenance of consistent user experience across the platform:
Logistically, in order to have works on the platform, they have to be connected to a partner.
Because we are not the experts and we do not have the cultural know-how – it’s our
partners that have that – the works can’t be floating on the platform without being
connected to an organization. In order to have that, they need to have a partner page. But if
you have a partner page with only three images, it just looks not very engaging or robust.
It’s not exactly good user experience.
27 See https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/harry-ransom-center.
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Issues Experienced by Partner Institutions
If the experience of the Mesoamerica Center revealed the lack of resources on the part of
GA&C to provide some of the services expected by institutional partners, then the experience of
HRC highlighted the lack of resources on the part of the institution, and due to the limited
resources, the ways in which the platform’s intended use is in conflict with the institution’s
internal priorities. Importantly, this conflict was by no means limited to those institutions that
decided not to collaborate with Google. Interviewees from existing partner institutions also
highlighted the following four broad categories of issues when using the platform.
Resources and Priorities
Overall, limited resources and competing internal priorities emerged as the two most
commonly mentioned themes by the interviewees, followed by the lack of eective
communication discussed above. In some cases, the institution’s digital strategy, including the
use of external platforms, was only temporarily prioritized during the pandemic, and the limited
resources were later diverted back to the creation of in-person experiences and other competing
initiatives. For some, individual sta members who initially advocated the use of the platform left
the organization, and their successors were much less enthusiastic about the collaboration. For
others, those who still championed the use of the platform simply did not rise high enough within
the organizational hierarchy to make the call and muster the necessary resources to continue the
collaboration (a point I return to in a later section). For some institutions, the entire partnership
with Google was just an experiment for them to become inspired on how to improve their own
digital strategies and infrastructures. In any case, what these scenarios have in common is the
contingent nature of the alignment between the platform and the institution, which, due to various
contextual factors, greatly diminished or discontinued the use of the platform over time.
One rare exception worth mentioning is the Georgia O’Keee Museum. Like many
institutions, the museum does not have enough resources to consistently contribute new content
to the platform. After discussing their diiculties with the GA&C team, the museum secured
short-term funding from Google for a dedicated editorial and production assistant position whose
responsibilities include creating content for a retrospective project about artist Georgia O’Keee.
The interviewees were not entirely sure, as they claimed, how the museum managed to secure
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this type of direct financial support from Google, but it involved museum management
communicating its needs with higher-ups within the GA&C team. This is the only case of direct
funding I identified from the interviews, and it is unclear how prevalent this kind of practice truly is
when it comes to special projects in general.
Motive and Commercialization
In addition to limited resources, competing internal priorities, and the absence of eective
communications, the interviewees also identified other issues, ranging from the speculatively
ideological to the intricately logistical. Towards the end of the interview, I asked if there is one
question that the interviewees would want to ask the GA&C team. The top response was always
about motive, perhaps best summarized by one interviewee:
Why? Why do you still exist? What are you here to do? Not what marketing asks you to say
what you’re doing, but what are you actually doing? What purpose within the Google
corporation does this serve? It’s been over 12 years, but we’ve never really had an answer
to that question.
Without clear communications about the intent of the platform beyond what the mission
statement proclaims, and in part due to the current lack of trust in private technology companies
in general, many interviewees instead speculated on what the initiative means for Google. As one
interviewee commented:
I think there’s always the question, “what do they want, why do they want this, what’s in it
for them?” When you’re at a nonprofit, you always wonder, “why does this big, multi-billion
dollar company want to partner with us?” Honestly, through various partnerships,
especially with bigger institutions, we’ve found that it gives them a little bit of clout to have
these larger, trusted, well-known arts institutions and other nonprofits. When they’re on
there, they can get more of the smaller ones or other people who might be a little bit more
hesitant.
Some were much more explicit about the exploitative nature of the entire initiative. As one
interviewee argued:
Back then, we were a lot less sophisticated about what that relationship was or would
turn into. Now I look at it, Google is basically using us for art washing in the extreme. All
these huge tech companies, Google chief among them, have all of these initiatives that are
about public benefits, corporations, or 501(c)(3)s, where they can demonstrate benefit to
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the community. In return, you focus on those things and don’t notice the others. For
Google, this was a very public-first path at that. How evil can we be? Look at all this great
museum stu that we did! You trust museums, right?
Others echoed the sentiment of distrust and, without using the term “Googlization,” emphasized
the larger role played by the company in the online ecosystem:
Google has completely ruined online advertisements. They’ve completely ruined online
search. They’ve done incredible amount of damage and actively participated in the
gentrification of the Internet. Why would I trust them with cultural heritage too?
This deep-seated distrust of Google, however, has not always been the case. It is important to
historicize the origin of the platform and the drastically dierent perception of the company in the
early 2010s. As one interviewee who worked with GA&C at multiple institutions recalled:
I would say in those days, we still had a lot of lingering techno utopianism left over from
Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. That aesthetic still informed a lot of decisions we made,
particularly around Google, which at that time was seen as the more honorable alternative
to Microsoft. It seems hilarious in retrospect, but at the time that was the dominating
framework. I think we still tended to take things that those companies – and Google in
particular – would say pretty much at face value.
Despite the criticism, what was clearly missing from the conversations was the reference
to the collection of data as a motive for the company to train and profit from its own proprietary
technologies, as many scholars have theorized within the frameworks of platformization and
datafication. When asked about the use of their collection (meta)data by Google beyond the
platform, only one interviewee explicitly noted the issues of datafication and commercialization:
They’re not charging people, but they’re training their AI. They are generating revenue that
will remain within the company at a time when arts and culture is massively underfunded,
under attack all the time from neocon censorship fetishists. They’re not going to charge
people to come, but of course they’re making money o of this when they sell AI products.
They are indirectly making money o of this.
For most institutions, however, the main concern with commercialization was to minimize the risk
of copyright infringement and to remain committed to open culture:
The topic of conversation internally revolves around copyright and licensing. The good
thing with the Google platform at the time we joined was that it all started with a
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conversation with folks from the platform, so we were very specific and intentional about
what we’re going to contribute. For us, that basically means contributing only things that
we know are free of copyright and licensing issues.
My primary concern is that it’s Google. Depending on the language in the contract,
you’re never quite sure what they’re going to do with your data and how they’re going to
use it. We went through a long back and forth revising our contract to ensure that it was
very clear about who owned the data that was posted there and what control Google had
over it.
Several other institutions shared similar internal deliberation and decision-making
processes, especially regarding the terms and conditions outlined in the partner contract. It was
also because of such internal deliberations that most interviewees were fully aware of the
tradeos and potential risks involved in sharing collection images and data, not just with Google,
but anywhere online.
When further asked about the use of their collection data for AI training purposes,
particularly against the backdrop of the Hollywood writers and actors strike in 2023 and the
broader social debate over the use of generative AI, the interviewees expressed a mix of non-
concern and resignation. On the one hand, they were not concerned about the use of their data
for training purposes because that use case is already covered in the contract, though not
specifically related to AI training. In the case of public domain images, several interviewees even
strongly defended, regardless of their personal convictions, the rights of Google, or anyone else
for that matter, to use the images and data as they fit. On the other hand, the sense of non-
concern was in part due to the inevitable fact, as many interviewees emphasized, that Google has
been scraping the Internet, including images published on their institutional websites, to train their
technologies for decades. As one interviewee summarized:
[We don’t have] full autonomy over how things appear. We are at the discretion of Google
in terms of how things appear. That’s something that we’ve realized as we’ve worked on it
more. […] At the end of the day, it serves the purpose of reaching more people and making
our collections more findable. Most of the stu that’s on the platform is public domain and
open content. This is all stu that people could go onto our website and take and do
whatever they want anyhow. People could take our entire collection, put it into some sort
of datasets, and still do AI with it, and there’s nothing we can do about that regardless.
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In other words, for reasons both within and beyond their control, most institutions
considered the datafication and potential commercialization of their collection simply as part of
“the cost of doing business” with Google and having a presence in the digital space in general. For
many institutions, this consideration was weighted against, and eventually outweighed by, the
perceived benefits of the collaboration.
Content Creation
While the issues of motive and commercialization may be abstract and sometimes
ideological in nature, logistical and practical matters also surfaced in terms of how the platform
and its various features are designed and implemented. For partner institutions, these problems
often centered around uploading images and creating stories on the platform.
Item Uploading. As a first step after establishing the partnership, an institution needs to
decide how many and which items to upload to the platform. The interviewees shared three
dierent approaches to accomplishing this task. First, the team in charge of the institution’s
GA&C account would identify an existing subset of collection highlights based on either a ready-
made catalogue or what is already available on its institutional website. This process was usually
done in consultation with the curatorial team and also took into account whether the images
meet the platform’s technical requirements (e.g., dimensions and resolutions). This process was
also where copyright was frequently mentioned. As one interviewee noted:
I think the biggest concern that we had initially was, and this is why that initial group that
we sent was largely public domain works, that the contracts with Google were flipped as
far as rights went. Compared to other contracts we worked with third party distributors,
where those platforms like Bridgman and ARTstor worked with all of the rights holders for
putting content and making content available through them, Google flipped it and the
contributing partners were responsible for rights clearance and rights analysis. That puts
more work on the contributing organizations.
Second, some institutions chose specific items based on the stories they, or another
institution, were working on, as images have to be first published on the platform before they can
be located in the storytelling tool (Figure 25). On an item level, institutions can decide whether
other partners can use their images for content creation, and several interviewees shared
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experiences of asking, or being asked by, another institution to upload particular items for cross-
collection storytelling. For instance, the interviewee from the Getty Museum recalled:
We had an exhibit on some Assyrian reliefs, and all of them were from the British Museum,
but none of them were online. It was quite a long process to get them to add the images to
their collection, so it would show up as the British Museum, because they weren’t on
there already. There’s been other cases with University of Arizona Museum of Art for the
de Kooning story that we did. The object is in their collection. We approached them saying
we wanted to do this story and asked whether they had any interest in being on the
platform. Ultimately, they approved of us loading it onto our platform, with the note that
it’s courtesy on the part of their collection, because they just don’t have enough sta to
maintain it.
Figure 25. The GA&C story editor interface.
Finally, several institutions mentioned that they were more than happy to share all the
public domain images from their collections with the platform. This process, however, was often
impeded by the lack of proper data standards and the data migration processes. Some
interviewees complained about the platform’s complete disregard of data standards and
vocabularies used by the museum community at large. As one of them noted:
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[Another issue] was the way data itself was organized. They just set it up in a way that
really seemed free for all. […] Seeing what they had put together, it’s clear now that they
were coming from a non-tabular, non-relational, graph database of a philosophy, and
shoehorning our stu into that was very diicult. They didn’t look at CDWA. They didn’t
look at CCO.28 None of the established cultural heritage data standards for sharing that
many other aggregators had worked on for decades! It was just, “this is what we want, give
it to us on our terms,” which characterizes a lot of what they have done with the whole
thing! For our data to fit into their schema, it was the diiculty of being a square peg in a
round hole.
Another interviewee cited the lack of proper metadata standards to challenge GA&C’s self-
claimed mission of preservation:
Google Arts & Culture is out claiming that they’re doing preservation but nothing that they
are doing meets any of the baseline standards for preservation. Look at Library of
Congress. Look at Europeana. There are a bunch of things that define what some of these
requirements are. […] What they are doing is not preservation because there’s no
commitment to the longevity of the data, and there is no data transparency about how the
data was collected, how the data was processed. The data is only available in proprietary
formats through a proprietary front end. They do not meet any preservation standards!
The result of being a square peg in a round hole sometimes meant that institutions had to
simplify, normalize, or “massage” their data into the format stipulated by the platform, which was
outlined in a spreadsheet template. Several interviewees described this process as laborious,
clunky, and even primitive, but the interviewee from the Walters Art Museum provided a dierent
perspective:
Not following major metadata standards, that is interesting, but I think their perspective
was dierent. They want to make it simple for both a small community library and the
MET, so they needed to find that lowest common denominator. I understand why they took
that simpler approach, and from a community outreach perspective, I even agree with it.
Maybe the museums on their own side should have the most robust datasets anyway. We
are, after all, the primary source.
Regardless of the reason, many institutions did end up uploading fewer items than they
otherwise would have, not least because metadata of such manually uploaded items will not be
synchronized with the institution’s own database. GA&C does provide a “Large Scale Data
28 Both CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) and CCO (Cataloguing Cultural Objects) are data
standards for the description of art, architecture, and other cultural works.
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Program,” which started in December of 2019, as a bespoke technical service for institutions with
more than 1,000 items to share. Presumably acting as an API, it promises to automate metadata
preparation and file uploading, synchronize collection information, and provide better integration
with Google Search.29 Still, only one interviewee mentioned this service and said that they “never
got to the point where theirs could connect to ours in the meaningful way.” Others recalled similar
eorts to connect their APIs to the platform, but the process was frustratingly slow and often
hindered by sta turnover within Google.
Story Creation. Interviewees from partner institutions that joined the platform in its early
days recalled no conversation about the storytelling feature, although one of them mentioned that
their institution had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Google about “some features that
had yet to go public.” Regardless, as another interviewee noted in their communication with
Google, during the platform’s transition from the Art Project to Arts & Culture around 2016, there
was also a shift in focus from showcasing individual objects to content creation in the form of
storytelling. As is shown in Figure 3, the average number of stories created by all U.S.-based
institutions is 5.6, with 50% of them creating somewhere between one to six stories. In fact, the
largest contributor of the platform in terms of items uploaded – LIFE Photo Collection with
4,402,304 items – does not have any story on its landing page at all, presumably because it joined
the platform before the story feature became available.
Regarding content creation strategies, especially in deciding the topic of the story, the
interviewees mentioned three dierent scenarios. First, some institutions joined the platform as
project partners, which often meant that there was already a loosely defined topic for them to
work around. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, the GA&C team would also regularly reach out to
partner institutions about new features and upcoming projects as a call for participation. Some of
these calls were about broad and recurring topics such as heritage months and sent to all U.S.-
based partners, while others were more specific, such as single-artist retrospectives, and were
often handled by Coordinators who would reach out to select institutions with particular
collections related to the project topic. Not only is this an important part of the platform’s editorial
29 See https://support.google.com/culturalinstitute/partners/answer/9584243.
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functions, but it also results in an inequality between the amount of attention and resources
dierent institutions receive. As the interviewee from the National Gallery of Art noted:
I feel like they treat museums dierently, which is a little tough to know, and I hate to see
that. I suspect that the smaller museums maybe don’t have the kind of collection that
Google thinks is going to drive traic.
Smaller institutions were well aware of the dierence as well. As one interviewee recalled:
When we launched the partnership, Google said they might feature our content in some
future projects, so we tagged them in all kinds of posts and sent them stu, but nothing
ever happened. As a small organization, that would be huge, so that was a little bit of a
disappointment.
Second, several interviewees mentioned that they took advantage of the platform to
create entirely new content that otherwise was not available anywhere else, including the one
museum that received direct funding from Google for one of its editorial positions. These use
cases, however, were highly contingent on extenuating circumstances (e.g., closure due to the
pandemic or building renovation) or individual sta members (or sometimes interns) who were
enthusiastic about the platform. As a result, this resource-intensive strategy has not been a
sustainable option for many institutions.
For most institutions, repurposing existing content, either from their own website or based
on a physical exhibition, was by far the most commonly adopted content strategy. For some,
repurposing was considered a “low risk” option considering the little amount of additional
research and curatorial work it required:
We did not create much new content for the platform. We have four stories on the
platform, and two of those were entirely repurposed from existing website content.
Nothing new was written. It was the exact same text, the exact same images, the exact
same embedded videos that we’ve just repurposed for that platform. That was certainly
very low risk.
For others, it was a matter of allocating limited resources among competing priorities:
It quickly became clear that these stories were a lot of work for minimal return, compared
to the work that we were already putting together around exhibitions. We could have
repurposed what we were already doing for exhibitions, whether that was our own
website, marketing materials, in-gallery interpretation, or maybe if we had a small
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publication or something, and we could repurpose them. But it really was such a specific
format that Google put together that we basically had to make a new thing.
The issue of format was also mentioned by other interviewees. One institution said they
“loved the spirit of experimentation” with Google:
But unfortunately, their platforms are just not very sophisticated, which is so weird! This is
mainly for artwork publishing, but they don’t allow you to say where you’re not going to
crop. In 2020, it was really forcing our content into certain kinds of layouts, and a lot of
those layouts go against our internal standards […] by which these artworks can be
published. It was not meeting those standards in a very basic way, like overprinting or
cropping, which we can’t control and are dierent based on screen size. That’s one of the
reasons we did not go more deeply, and we actually ended up building our own platform
for publishing.
Similarly, another institution highlighted how the constraints of the storytelling format, from an
interface design perspective, frustrated the content creation process, especially when dierent
teams within the institution had to collaborate on the story:
I got distracted and everyone got distracted with the interface: Do we want this on the left
or the right? Do we want this text to be big or small? Is it a composing environment? Is it a
design tool? It’s trying to do all of these things to the detriment of each and to all of the
others. It was a bit distracting as a tool to use. I like to focus the project on composing first
and then on designing, but that was tricky to do. It’s like designing the publication while
you’re writing it, which is not what they’re used to, for good reason. That’s not what you
probably should do, because otherwise you just get in this loop and you find yourself
writing for the design. That’s not authorship. It’s backwards in some ways.
Internal Dynamics
The issues outlined in the previous sections highlight dierent points of tension between
the platform and the institution, from the establishment of the partnership to the use of the
platform on the ground. Another important aspect – and I argue this is what GA&C has not paid
suicient attention to – concerns the internal dynamics within the partner institutions. From
choosing which items to share to deciding what stories to create, there were always additional
layers of translation, communication, and negotiation between the digital team in charge of
managing the platform and the curatorial team, which typically had to sign on with most content
decisions for the continued use of external platforms. As a result, partner institutions sometimes
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inherited a patchy institutional memory about digital initiatives in general, struggled with internal
communication and collaboration regarding the use of external platforms, and often lacked the
data analytics needed to justify continued investment in using GA&C.
Institutional Memory. The first issue regarding internal dynamics is the lack of robust
institutional memory of how the partnership unfolded or developed. The GA&C platform, for some
reason, does not show when an institution initially joined the initiative, and most interviewees,
unless they had a copy of the partnership agreement at hand, could not even recall in which year
their organization started collaborating with Google. A very common response to this question
was: “No? I’m not sure anyone does, really! I’m sure someone has a definitive date, but even my
boss can’t remember that. It’s always, ‘oh, a couple years ago.’”
Sta turnover, along with the lack of proper transition, was the main reason behind such
patchy memories. A new sta member in the digital team might not be as interested in the use of
the platform as their predecessor, who usually did not have the opportunity to share with the
organization as to strategically why and practically how to use the platform. As one interviewee
recalled, right before leaving their job:
In my last few hours, it was pretty much transferring all the passwords over, and that’s it!
There was no chance of having a discussion about what our intent is behind these various
projects, so most of those things that I was working on probably just stopped right at that
point.
In some extreme cases, despite the best eorts of individual sta members, even the login
credentials could be lost in the transition process:
I left all of the credentials to my department head, and I left very thorough project
documentation. But when someone picked up that documentation and tried to take over,
they were asking me, “[name] can’t find the credentials, do you remember them?” And I
thought, “are you kidding me?” As long as it isn’t prioritized and made a part of someone’s
responsibility, it is really easy for these incredibly detailed needs to slip through the
cracks!
Despite the criticism about communications and sta turnover on the part of Google, the lack of
institutional memory has prompted some interviewees to critically reflect on their own
organizational practices:
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I think sta turnover at Google is a convenient scapegoat, but I also think that sta
turnover at the museum is a big problem too, because these are long projects, and the
sustainability option has to be built into the responsibility for a position, and not the
interests and motivations of an individual person.
Indeed, the role played by individual sta members who were enthusiastic about the
platform was a recurring theme among the interviews. Whether it was contacting Google to
establish the partnership, working on API integration to automate metadata migration, or creating
new content on a regular basis, individual sta members in the institution’s digital, media, web, or
information technology teams were an indispensable contributor to the platform’s successful and
sustained adoption. Without building these platform-oriented responsibilities into a permanent
role, however, using the platform as a genuine part of the institution’s digital strategy would be too
contingent to be sustainable.
Internal Communication. Beyond preserving the institutional memory and maintaining a
consistent platform strategy, another important aspect of the partner institutions’ internal
dynamics was the communication, collaboration, and occasional frustration between the digital
team and the curatorial team. First of all, there seemed to be a lingering dierence in philosophy
about everything digital to begin with. When discussing some AI-based new features on the
platform, one interviewee said, “Well, I am not a curator, let’s put it that way, so I have a much
broader tolerance for stu like this than other folks would.” Similarly, another said, “I could see the
curators freaking out in a bad way about all this! If you’re speaking with them, they would be
extremely upset and would want to take everything down!”
Not only do these comments demonstrate a clear disparity between the digital sta and
the curatorial sta regarding digital technologies, but they also signal, according to some of the
interviewees, a misunderstanding of the platform’s intended use and target audience on the part
of their curatorial colleagues. As one interviewee from their institution’s digital media production
team mentioned:
The curator really thought Google Arts & Culture was a platform for scholarly research and
wanted to preserve those handwritten photo captions verbatim. We tried to explain that
that’s not how it works. […] They’re always thinking about it in terms of it being an
exhibition and a resource for scholars. They will always come to us with 20 to 30 images,
and that’s where my team comes in, saying, “no, no, no, we need to do way fewer than
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that!” We always try to ask: What’s going to make the best story? What are the smallest
number of images that we can tell the story in?
In some cases, the misunderstanding made it diicult for curators to adapt to the story as a short-
form medium:
Some of the hesitancy we still get is, for instance, the character count, which is 280
characters per slide. For a scholar, that is not a lot. That is pulling teeth to get them to write
that succinctly. We’ve had pushback from them before, “this is what I want to write,” and
we had to go back and say, “I understand that, but this is not the right space for that. This is
who it’s for. This is what we’re talking about, we need to make it digestible.” It’s been like a
training process: some people just get it, “okay, short, sweet to the point, here’s what
we’re writing,” but some people want it to be a spot for scholarly essays, and we have to
tell them, “that is not it, not here.”
This process was echoed by other institutions as well:
Our curators found that very frustrating to work with because of all of the length
requirements. The web is not their native platform. They write long books, they write
exhibition labels that have four paragraphs on them, and they came at this thing, thinking
this is a digital exhibition tool, but it’s not. It’s a lot more like a blogging platform, and it is a
short form medium. I understand that as a web developer, but a scholar really struggles
with that, and I think some compromise would be in order there.
For some interviewees, the curators’ misunderstanding of the platform was symptomatic of their
broader insuicient familiarity with digital technologies in general:
Our diiculty was the relationship with curators. […] They wanted control over everything!
They wanted to zoom in on these things, and I had to tell them, “we can’t because the
image isn’t big enough or because Google doesn’t have that,” basically helping them
understand what they can and cannot do. It’s frustrating for someone outside of the
technology sphere to say, “Google can do anything! Why am I being presented with this
barrier?” As a middleman, this was really frustrating! […] The curators set their entire life
studying three dierent kinds of fibers in use in a tiny town on the other side of the world.
You know what I mean? They’re very specific in their knowledge, but it does not include
websites, and it does not include databases.
What, then, did the partners do to address the curator’s misunderstanding? Some of the
interviewees shared their eorts to communicate and negotiate with the curatorial team. As one
of them explained:
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It’s really about trying to socialize with the curators, explaining how this will look, attention
spans, web usage, all of the things that they don’t know about but that our team knows
about, and to really set limits on that. That’s what we’re always fighting against, that
people always want to put in more than there is reasonably room for.
Similarly, another interviewee oered a detailed account of how they worked with curators to
integrate the platform into their work:
It’s taken some education, training, or just informational encouragement to get our
curators and senior sta more comfortable with the platform. […] It was a matter of
working with them, showing them the benefits of being able to zoom in on an image, really
emphasizing that it is object-focused because it is really about looking at the objects in a
way that [is dierent from] our website.
Then, it was a matter of going to them and saying: Is there anything that you would
like to talk about in gallery but haven’t been able to? Is there something that you’ve wanted
to write a blog post about, but haven’t been able to? Or did you find something cool in the
collection that’s really neat, but you’re not really sure where to talk about it? Basically, it
was just working with them through a bunch of dierent angles to see what’s possible on
the platform.
Once we started building [stories], we then showed them the stats we had. A
particularly good one early on was our new acquisitions, one for 2019 that we pulled
together and published. That was featured early in the pandemic on a promo they did for
International Museum Day, and it was a top banner, and it got tons of views! We said to
them: look at the reach your content could be having by contributing to the platform and
utilizing this partnership and their willingness to include and promote our content!
In other words, the successful adoption of the platform as a content creation tool
depends in large part on a constructive internal working relationship, especially one in which the
digital team can help the curatorial team to understand the intended use and potential benefits of
the platform and to overcome the technical challenges of storytelling due to specific aordances
of the platform.
Analytics and Impact. Unfortunately, eective cross-team communication has not been
the experience for most institutions, not least because many of them were not keeping track of
the data analytics provided by the platform. In other words, the impact of the partnership with
Google and the institution’s presence on the platform has not always been assessed or even
taken into account to justify the platform’s continued use as part of the institution’s overall digital
strategy. Thanks to one interviewee who generously shared their data, it is clear that the data
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analytics provided by GA&C include two monthly spreadsheets, which institutions can download
from the platform backend:
• Page Views: the number of times (and the average time spent) an institution’s various
pages (including the landing page, items, and stories) have been viewed, as well as the
country, platform (web or mobile, Android or iOS), and traic source (Google, direct from
the platform, or other) of these views.
• Viewers: the country, platform, traic source, and daily views sum of each viewer.
First, many interviewees expressed disappointment and frustration with the type and
scope of data provided. As one interviewee commented:
Why doesn’t Google Arts & Culture have a decent analytics panel? I have to download raw
data and run it through this process and it’s really opaque. I just don’t understand why they
don’t have that, and it’s something that I’ve expressed frustration with. I think every
participant that I’ve worked with has also said the same thing. […]
I find it really hard to believe that they are making decisions and essentially
initiating content without any analytics. Do they survey their visitors? Granted, we have
become much more customer focused in the past few years than before, but we don’t
make a decision without getting data. We test everything. It’s Google, how could they not
be? How can there not be some kind of analytics that they’re not sharing with us?
Apparently, the current data analytics is a downgrade from a previous version. As one interviewee
recalled, having worked with the platform since the very beginning:
I haven’t looked at this for a while, so I could be wrong in what I’m stating. But in the
original version of the Art Project, you could install your own Google Linux Property ID, but
they dispensed with that feature many years ago in favor of just giving you the CSV
download files, which gave you much less data about what was going on the platform.
Other interviewees shared a similar sentiment of frustration with the data, except those in a data-
focused role, who occasionally joked about being “used to having bad data!” Often, the
interviewees would compare GA&C with the company’s other products such as Google Analytics
(and sometimes YouTube), which provided the “gold standard” of web analytics and is arguably at
the core of Google’s entire business model.
All but two institutions interviewed said they had not tracked the data for months, if not
years, with two smaller institutions not even realizing the analytics were available. Those that do
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pay attention to the metrics have had a hard time using the data to justify the use of the platform
to the rest of the institution:
I wish Google was more transparent and I could see how many visitors were looking at
these stories. Without measurement, I can’t advocate to my boss and say, look how many
people saw this story, we should absolutely be putting more resources into this. We’re just
operating blind, just assuming that a lot of people are coming there. If I could show a lot of
traic, that would help me make my case.
Similarly, another interviewee shared:
We look at it and we keep track of the size of that audience, but it’s not even one that I
report as part of my overall metrics. I’m ready to answer questions about it if they ever
come up in our meetings. I think the metrics that I would be more interested in is following
users from that platform to ours. The hope maybe is that on the Google platform we’re
creating some curiosity about the artwork, and then they would go to the primary source
for the latest, greatest, and more information.
Despite the ideal pathway of drawing users from the platform to the institution’s own
website, without informative data analytics to understand the use of the collections by the
audiences or, in the case of smaller institutions, the resources or bandwidth to keep track of the
data in the first place, the impact of the collaboration with Google was never truly addressed by
the partner institutions. As a result, the institution’s digital team often found it diicult to convince
their curatorial colleagues to devote time and resources required to meaningfully use the platform
as part of the digital strategy.
Summary
In this chapter, I focused on the issue of platform governance and how it has reshaped
organizational practices on the ground as cultural institutions partnered with GA&C, adopted its
tools and features, and altered, for better or worse, their internal dynamics in the same process.
As the interviewees recalled the unfolding of their partnership with Google, I have shown that
most partner institutions, despite having mixed feelings about GA&C being an initiative led by a
private company, had hoped for the creation of a unified catalogue with technological and
logistical support from Google that would help them reach and engage with a broader audience
base in the digital space. While this may be an aspiration shared by the community at large, it
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often took a critical alignment between the platform and the institution to kickstart the
partnership in reality, whether it was part of the institution’s long-term digital strategy or simply a
measure of expediency because of extenuating circumstances.
Despite the shared vision, mutual benefits, and the genuine goodwill of individuals from
both the GA&C team and the partner institutions, the alignment and the partnership it sustained
ended up being temporary and experimental at best due to a variety of issues. The perceived
disparity between what the platform seemed to promise and the amount of support institutions
actually received, along with the lack of eective communication due to limited human capacity
on the part of the GA&C team and the resulting lack of clarity about Google’s true motives, made
the partnership much less enticing, if not downright impractical, especially for institutions with
limited resources or competing priorities.
Nonetheless, several interviewees expressed appreciation for Google’s eorts and shared
positive experiences working with the GA&C team. This included oering feedback on making
story texts more accessible and engaging for younger audiences, respecting the authoritative
voice of partner institutions in content creation, and connecting with Google developers about
new features and technical issues. However, the interviews did not reveal a discernible pattern of
which institutions had more success with the platform. Although internal resources were
necessary, they were not suicient on their own. Continued use of the platform seemed to
depend more on a constructive internal dynamic within partner institutions, where the digital
team could eectively communicate and collaborate with the curatorial sta to utilize the
platform in alignment with their institutional missions.
In terms of platform governance, technical and logistical issues abounded, ranging from
interface (e.g., constraining formats) to infrastructure (e.g., lacking data standards), which
hindered the platform’s use and integration into the institutions’ digital strategy to a fuller extent, if
they had one to begin with. The partner institutions, in the meantime, were not without
vulnerabilities, from internal sta turnover within the digital team that at times created a patchy
institutional memory to the tension with and misunderstanding on the part of curatorial sta
about the intended use and demonstrated eectiveness of the platform. Despite the occasional
positive feedback, the collaboration with Google for most institutions ended up being a daring
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venture of experimentation in the digital space, an emergent measure of convenience during the
global pandemic, or a legacy archive that is no longer being actively maintained. The use of the
platform, in other words, “unfortunately didn’t stick.”
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Chapter 7: Conclusion
While I have always been intrigued by the Google Arts & Culture platform, the decision to
pursue this research project did not materialize until the global pandemic became a daunting
reality in early 2020. Far from a tangential personal anecdote, this historical (in)opportuneness
not only encapsulates much of the platform’s origin, expansion, and current state, but also mirrors
how cultural institutions have interacted with and adapted to the initiative over the past 13 years.
The Art Project started at a time when most of the museum community was not ready to
establish a presence in the digital space. Google’s initial invitation coincided with some of the
sector’s early experiments with the web and organizational restructuring happening within larger
institutions that established the prototypical digital team. Fast forward to 2020, and cultural
institutions around the world were forced to migrate their operation to the digital space without
necessarily being ready in terms of technical infrastructure or human expertise. Some of them
resorted to Google while others revived an existing, if not dormant, partnership to experiment with
new formats of online storytelling and engagement. This is the social and institutional background
against which Google plays a part, for better or worse, in the platformization of the cultural sector.
This is also the story that I have set out to tell throughout this dissertation, one about the
platformization of the cultural sector, about the adoption of and resistance against one of
Google’s lesser-known platform products, and about the interplay between governance
mechanisms of the platform and internal practices of its institutional partners. In this concluding
chapter, I situate the key findings of the study vis-à-vis the research questions, discuss the
theoretical relevance and practical implications of these findings, and address the limitations of
the study while suggesting directions for future research.
Synthesis of Key Findings
How did Google’s digital cultural heritage initiative evolve from the Art Project into Arts &
Culture over the past 13 years? Using archival analysis to reconstruct a nuanced platform
timeline, I demonstrated the confluence of two simultaneous trends. On the one hand, the initially
separated art, history, and heritage projects managed by the Google Cultural Institute were later
consolidated into one unified brand of GA&C, as dierent types of cultural institutions converged
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onto the platform, transforming itself into one ever-expanding networked memory institution. On
the other hand, the initiative gradually diverged, particularly on the app, from facilitating and
empowering cultural institutions to attracting and engaging with audiences through increasingly
gamified content without consulting partners on which features should be developed initially or
adequately communicating afterwards how such content might align with their needs. Despite
the trend of digital convergence and the presence of the wide array of topics, the platform still
shows a clear and lingering preference, as perceived by partner institutions, for still images
commonly found in art museums and cultural heritage sites. However, for all the disparity
between its mission statement and actual evolution, as well as the strategic ambiguity about its
motive and primary users, GA&C has nonetheless provided cultural institutions with a growing set
of tools for storytelling, discoverability, and engagement, which have proven to be a useful option
for some partners to expand their presence in the digital space.
After partner institutions signed up for the platform, uploaded items, and created stories,
what happened to these contributions? How are they being presented on the platform? Based on
content analysis of the highly curated section “Tod a y ’s top picks” and the interview with the
GA&C Program Manager, I revealed the essential curatorial and editorial functions fulfilled by the
GA&C team in deciding the topics of thematic projects and maintaining a regularly updated
section of featured content, with some authored by the platform’s editorial team and others
serving to promote its new features. Based on discursive interface analysis of the platform’s
interface design, I also highlighted the narrow set of user actions aorded by the platform, which,
despite the objection from some institutions, perpetuates a passive mode of user engagement
that falls short of the promises of a truly participatory culture. Both the macro process of cultural
canonization and the micro process of technical circumscription have a conditioning eect on
how content is being presented on the platform, prioritizing select content from only a few
institutions and prescribing a passive mode of user engagement that is enclosed in the platform’s
proprietary technologies. Contrary to the platform metaphor, GA&C is far from being a neutral
facilitator that simply helps cultural institutions fulfil their mission online.
How, at the other side of the equation, did cultural institutions respond to the invitation
from Google? Why did some institutions decide to join the initiative while others passed on the
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oer? And how was the use of the platform influenced by its various governance mechanisms?
Based on in-depth interviews with individuals from 23 institutions, I showed that the partners had
hoped for the creation of an aggregate portal with technological support from the technology
sector that would help them establish and expand their presence in the digital space. In reality,
the alignment between the platform and the institution was either a response to the institution’s
digital strategy or an expediency due to extenuating circumstances. Several interviewees shared
overall positive experience with the platform, but despite the genuine eorts of individuals from
both GA&C and the partner institutions, the alignment ended up being contingent and
experimental because of a variety of issues, including limited resources on both sides, the lack of
eective communication from Google to manage the growing partnerships, sta turnover on both
sides resulting in a patchy institutional memory regarding digital initiatives, competing internal
priorities within the partner institutions especially after the pandemic, and internal power
dynamics between the digital team and curatorial sta that may not be conducive to sustained
communication and collaboration required to fully take advantage of the platform.
So, what exactly is GA&C? Based on findings presented in this dissertation, I argue that it
is an under-resourced and misconceived initiative within Google that provides cultural institutions
with an image repository and storytelling tools, but it communicates primarily yet inadequately
with the partner institutions’ digital team, which often lacks the infrastructural capacity or
hierarchical power to prioritize the collaboration and allocate necessary resources to fully utilize
the platform. For GA&C, carrying the name of Google was a double-edged sword that, while
grabbing attention, also created a persistent misconception that the platform had the company’s
infinite resources at its disposal. The absence of resources in turn limited what the platform can
oer to partner institutions, reducing it to essentially an online publishing platform, while eorts
to digitize collections and improve analytics have largely been stalled. Moreover, GA&C’s limited
sta capacity and resulting lack of eective communication significantly hampered its eorts to
maintain the growing number of partnerships it forged over time. For institutional partners, the use
of external platforms was usually assigned, if not relegated, to the digital, technology, media, or IT
department, if they even had one to begin with. While the digital team required curatorial input to
decide what and how to contribute to the platform, it typically could not set internal priorities or
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allocate suicient resources to utilize the platform meaningfully and sustainably. The few success
stories were exceptions rather than the rule, relying heavily on the digital team proactively
communicating and collaborating with curatorial sta about the platform’s intended use and
potential benefits for the institution.
Rethinking Participation, Privatization, and Platformization
What do these findings mean for the broader conceptual issues raised in the literature
review, such as the ideal of the virtual museum, the enclosure of the cultural commons, and the
permeation of platform governance? From a practical perspective, what lessons could Google or
similar initiatives learn from the 13 years of experience? After all, GA&C is by no means the only
platform dedicated to arts and culture. Whether it is the supranational portal Europeana, national
projects in countries such as the UK (e.g., Art UK), Denmark (e.g., Dansk Kulturarv), or Germany
(e.g., museum-digital), emerging initiatives such as Curationist, or single-institution websites that
increasingly function as an open platform, the same tensions surrounding issues of participation,
privatization, and platformization will likely emerge and need to be addressed for these platforms
to remain relevant in the long run.
Whose Participation?
Except for the two museums that renegotiated the contract with Google to add an option
for users to download public domain images, GA&C, with its reliance on proprietary technologies
and limited user aordances, does not accommodate the kind of user-oriented creative reuse
envisioned by the participatory culture. However, for a sector that still relies heavily on curatorial
expertise and professional interpretation, the questions remain: Is it really Google’s responsibility
to engage users beyond the read-only and sit-back-and-be-told culture? Do users really want to
create their own remix or would they rather, especially younger generations, simply scroll through
arts and culture the same way they interact with almost everything else online? In other words,
without fully taking into account the exploitative nature of using platforms as digital labor, or the
agency and autonomy of individual users to decide their preferred mode of engagement, was the
notion of a remix-based participatory culture an aspirational aberration of the 2000s?
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At a time when getting high enough view counts is already a commendable performance
indicator for many cultural institutions, would they realistically expect users to generate creative
content as well? As one interviewee put it, if a high school student learned about an artist with
some AI gimmicks on GA&C, “Who are we to say that is not meaningful engagement? Is it really
our place to say one engagement is preferred over another?” Moreover, the ideal virtual museum,
whether envisioned by avant-gardists in the 1920s or experimented by museum practitioners in
the 1990s, was always experimental, interactive, spectacularized, and sometimes gamified, but
audience participation in the sense of creating content was rarely part of the idea. GA&C already
functions as a brochure museum, content museum, and learning museum, but are we supposed
to impose the mandate of the participatory museum on the platform as well, when the sector at
large has yet to figure out a sustainable formula for encouraging user contributions?
That does not mean, however, that there is no place for a community-driven approach on
a digital platform that encourages collaborative participation by individual experts or professional
organizations. For instance, Europeana runs an annual Digital Storytelling Festival that invites
cultural heritage professionals, educators, and students – instead of individual end users – to tell
stories about arts and culture and cultivate their storytelling skills.30 Taking a dierent approach,
Curationist, an open access initiative launched in 2023, has created residency programs such as
Curationist Fellows and Critics of Color. 31 These opportunities seek to support writers, artists,
researchers, and cultural professionals to collaborate and co-create editorial features related
both to their expertise and collections on the platform. While not shying away from their own
editorial function, both initiatives manage to embrace a community-driven approach that
encourages the participation by domain experts – again, not individual users – with diverse voices
and fosters a more inclusive environment for cultural co-creation. Could GA&C adopt a similar
approach? It is perhaps unlikely in the short term, given the limited resources of the team. More
importantly, it would also require a more collaborative mindset and communicative approach,
something GA&C has not consistently displayed when working with cultural institutions.
30 See https://pro.europeana.eu/page/digital-storytelling-festival.
31 See https://www.curationist.org/about.
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The Irrelevance of Algorithms?
One of the recurring arguments throughout this dissertation is the essential editorial and
curatorial functions fulfilled by the GA&C team through its special projects and daily features.
While taking a more collaborative approach, platforms such as Europeana and Curationist also
play an important editorial role. If anything, these alternative platforms have been very transparent
about their own editorial interventions, assigning content authorship to specific internal sta
members or external collaborators. In contrast, little information is available about GA&C’s
editorial team. The stories they created all come with an anonymous byline of “By Google Arts &
Culture” and the platform itself, as the PM claimed, “tried to keep it neutral and educational.”
Regardless of the adopted approach or the underlying philosophy, what such platform-led
content editorialization presents is a direct challenge to the mythologized platform metaphor that
it is merely a neutral facilitator that helps users create and share their own content.
Meanwhile, these human-centered editorial interventions also provide a counterpoint to
what Gillespie (2014) called the algorithmic logic, which depends on machine-driven procedural
choices to automate some aspects of human judgment. In fact, these interventions perfectly
instantiate the old editorial logic algorithms are supposed to replace, one that “depends on the
subjective choices of experts, who are themselves made and authorized through institutional
processes of training and certification, or validated by the public through the mechanisms of the
market” (p. 192). Indeed, from reviewing partnership applications, selecting project topics, and
curating daily top picks, to the operation of the cultural sector itself, such “institutional processes”
and “subjective choices” mostly characterize the content-related decision-making on GA&C, in
which, as the PM confirmed, algorithms did not play any significant role, at least for now. There is
no denying the disruptive impacts that algorithmic sorting has on restructuring the allocation of
social resources in general and conditioning content visibility on platforms in particular. However,
for specialized platforms in arts and culture that value institutional authority and interpretative
expertise, the editorial logic remains robust, and perhaps it should. The question for GA&C, or any
other platform, is how to establish trust and maintain transparency with both individual users and
institutional partners while fulfilling their necessary editorial responsibilities.
The Googlization of Arts and Culture?
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The issues of trust and transparency, or lack thereof according to the feedback of many
institutional partners, circle back to the basic premise of this dissertation that Google’s expansion
into arts and culture risks eroding the cultural heritage commons as the display and dissemination
of digital cultural heritage become increasingly platform-dependent. If the second enclosure is
about the adoption of legal, managerial, and technological strategies for corporations to control
and commodify public information (Boyle, 2003), and if the rise of networked memory institutions
is about the privatization of traditional memory institutions as they increasingly adopt proprietary
practices (Pessach, 2008), did these happen on GA&C? Is the arts and culture sector irrevocably
Googlized?
On the one hand, the fact that most institutions had to digitize their own collection and the
decision for Google to circumvent sector-wise data standards made it very diicult for partners to
adopt Google’s infrastructural services and replace their own content management system. In
many cases, partner institutions had to normalize their datasets to accommodate the sharing of
images and their metadata with the platform. On the other hand, the platform’s interface regime is
unforgivingly standardized and proprietary, to which partner institutions simply had to adapt their
own internal practices. That said, some institutions already cracked open the otherwise seamless
interface design by insisting on the addition of a download option in pursuit of open access, while
others, having experimented with what Google had to oer, decided to build a bespoke platform
or launch their own initiatives, sometimes inspired by Google’s technologies. Overall, when the
use of the platform cannot even be strategically sustained, the incursion and displacement by
Google’s proprietary technologies within traditional memory institutions was hardly ever a real
concern.
Still, cultural institutions worldwide have contributed enormous quantities of high-quality
and hitherto unexploited images and metadata through GA&C in the past 13 years. While it may
be impossible to definitively prove how Google profited from these free contributions – whether
by improving other products such as Search and YouTube, training proprietary algorithms and
generative AI models, or simply, as the interviewees said, gathering clout and art washing – the
fact that Google says in the platform FAQ that it will not “directly monetize the content” is enough
of a confession that indicates the economic value of the platform for the company at large.
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Moreover, the interviewees were fully aware of, if not slightly resigned to, how their collections
have been used and abused by for-profit entities in general once they publish content online.
Regarding the use of collection images to train generative AI models without credits or fair
compensation, the most common sentiment among the interviewees was, unfortunately, that
“anyone can do that anyway.” In the end, GA&C perhaps did not privatize cultural institutions in
the same way, or to the same extend, contemplated by many critical scholars, but the
datafication of arts and culture, or a narrower version of Googlization, may already be the reality
through the inevitable process of platformization.
Lessons for Cultural Institutions
What lessons could cultural institutions, whether or not they work with GA&C, learn from
the issues discussed throughout the dissertation? After all, the overarching narrative I hope to
recount is as much about the platformization of the cultural sector as about the digital capacity of
cultural institutions as they work with external platforms to fulfill their institutional missions. From
the creation of a long-term digital strategy to the development of a collaborative internal working
environment, how should the cultural sector at large better prepare itself? In collaboration with
the American Alliance of Museums, the Knight Foundation (2020) commissioned a study of 480
museums of dierent sizes and types across the U.S., with survey data collected before the
global pandemic, to understand the “digital readiness and innovation maturity” of the museum
sector. The study identified several issues that prove relevant to the findings of this dissertation,
including limited digital staing, still emergent digital strategies, and siloed digital projects where
outcomes are barely tracked and audience insights poorly integrated (see also Merritt, 2021).
Indeed, the issues discussed in Chapter 6 resonate with the Knight Foundation study and
highlight the importance of cultivating an institution’s digital readiness. Many interviewees in the
dissertation were part of dedicated digital teams, but those from smaller organizations often
handled multiple roles, making digital initiatives just one of their many responsibilities. As a result,
these initiatives were often not prioritized and depended on the enthusiasm or commitment of
individual sta members, rather than being embedded within the responsibilities of a predefined
position. In terms of digital strategies, only four interviewees articulated a coherent, long-term
vision for their institution in the digital space, whereas others simply equated digital strategies
151
with whatever the digital team is tasked with on a regular basis. Similarly, the lack of collaboration
or communication between the digital team and the curatorial sta reflected the siloed nature of
many digital projects. In one extreme case, an interviewee had never heard of GA&C until another
team from the organization presented the final result of their published stories on the platform.
Finally, the lack of useful analytics from GA&C or the lack of eorts on the part of cultural
institutions to integrate available data into decision-making processes also tracks with the
findings of the Knight Foundation study.
The cultural sector alone may not be able to solve all these problems, and despite the
trend of digital convergence on GA&C, non-museum cultural institutions from other countries
may also face unique challenges not discussed in this dissertation. Nonetheless, the concept of
digital readiness, however defined in practice, still provides a useful guiding framework for cultural
institutions to take stock of available resources, assess their current level of digital capacity, and
identify areas of improvement that most urgently need to be addressed. To that end, the Knight
Foundation study includes a matrix of “digital innovation attributes” – strategy, people, practices,
audience, partnerships – that can help cultural institutions assess their own level of technical and
organizational readiness. This is perhaps the one piece of advice I would like to oer to cultural
institutions at the end of the dissertation. Whether it is GA&C, another platform company, or other
unforeseeable waves of disruption unleashed by the rampant (ab)use of generative AI, the
cultivation of digital readiness throughout the organization will always be an essential aspect of
building institutional robustness while endeavoring to fulfill their mission in the radically changing
digital world.
Beyond This Dissertation
In this dissertation, I employed various methods to examine the archived history, content
presentation, and institutional use of the Google Arts & Culture platform. While the findings shed
new light on the process of platformization as it unfolds in the cultural sector, it is important to
note its limitations and suggest possible directions for future research. First, while platforms
increasingly exhibit the characteristics of multi-sided markets, this study only focuses on two
sides: platform provider and institutional users. The only reference to end users is the way in
which the platform’s limited aordances prescribe a passive mode of user engagement. While
152
that is a normative statement about the platform’s intended use, how it has been used in reality by
dierent user demographics remains unclear. This is in part due to the lack of use data shared by
the platform, a point of complaint by many institutional partners as well. Therefore, future
research might situate the platform in specific contexts, provide detailed case studies of its use
among certain groups (e.g., students or educators) or, from a user experience design perspective,
follow the walkthrough method and understand how individual users navigate the platform
interface, especially with the newly designed mobile app.
Second, while content analysis of the Today’s top picks section revealed a clear pattern of
the platform prioritizing certain institutions or certain types of content, the analysis was largely
content agnostic, gathering information on whose stories were frequently featured yet not taking
into account what those stories were really about. Did institutional partners favor deep dives into
certain artists or artworks while those created by GA&C tend to be light-hearted art trivia? As one
interviewee distinguished between content creation (by the GA&C team) and knowledge creation
(by domain experts), this dissertation never addresses this distinction on a granular level. It is
possible to manually analyze each top pick and compile the results, but it might be advantageous
for future research to utilize computational methods (e.g., with a machine learning classifier) to
dissect the data more systematically and eiciently.
Third, while the interviewee with the GA&C PM provided much needed information about
the internal working of the GA&C team, it was limited to the account of one individual that was not
with the initiative from the very beginning and is only part of its U.S. operation. Access to more
members from the GA&C team, especially those managing other regions or from other functional
groups, may help paint a more complete picture of the team’s overall decision-making processes.
Similarly, most of the interviews with institutional partners involved sta members of the digital,
media, or technology team. As internal dynamics prove to be an important factor of the platform’s
adoption, what would have been the responses of, for example, curators, educators, registrars, or
institutional management? Future research therefore could expand the pool of interviewees and
seek to identify potentially dierent perspectives within the cultural institutions.
Finally, while this dissertation examines platformization as a broader social phenomenon,
many external factors and stakeholders are not taken into account. For example, the pursuit of
153
open access on the part of cultural institutions may, as it happens, challenge the platform as a
form of infrastructural walled garden, but this is an institution-wide decision that would involve
stakeholders beyond the everyday work of the digital team or curators. Also, the cultural policy
and political environment of a particular country may aect the amounts of resources cultural
institutions receive to develop their digital capacity. Would Google manage the partnerships
dierently, for example, in European countries where GA&C is not the only platform available? Or
is the neoliberal tendency, complicated by rising nationalist rhetoric worldwide, overriding the
traditional state support model, thereby delegating an even larger role to the private sector in the
near future? Finally, as generative AI disrupts every social sector as we speak, how would the
regulation of AI, or lack thereof, shape the future direction of the platform? This dissertation
examines the issue of regulation by platforms, but what about regulation of platforms? These
questions invite researchers to consider stakeholders and factors beyond the immediate scope of
this study and help understand platformization and its intricate interaction with diverse social,
institutional, and regulatory dynamics.
154
Appendix A: Interview Questions
Background
1. Can you introduce your organization and your position in it?
2. Does your organization have a dedicated digital team or a long-term digital strategy?
3. How did your organization first hear about GA&C? What was your first impression?
4. What motivated you to join the platform? What concerns did you have?
5. What was the application process like? How long did it take?
Use of the Platform
1. Which services and tools has your organization used so far?
2. Are there any restrictions on how you can use the digitized copies?
3. How does your organization decide which content to publish on the platform? Have you
ever taken down any content from the platform?
4. How much do you know about the users of the platform?
5. Have you collaborated with other institutions through GA&C?
Organizational Changes
1. To what extent is GA&C integrated into your organization’s overall digital strategy?
2. What have been the benefits of using the platform, for your organization and audiences?
3. What have been the challenges of using the platform? How have you addressed them?
4. How have you measured the impact of using the platform? Based on what metrics?
Conclusion
1. In retrospect, what has the collaboration with Google meant for your organization?
2. If you can ask the GA&C team one question or make one comment, what would that be?
3. Is there anything else you would like to share?
155
Appendix B: TTP Distribution by Country (08/2020 – 12/2021)
Country (including GA&C) Frequency Percentage
GA&C
955
38.43%
GA&C*
534
21.49%
United States
236
9.50%
N/A
200
8.05%
United Kingdom
112
4.51%
France
51
2.05%
Australia
51
2.05%
Russia
47
1.89%
Germany
40
1.61%
Nigeria
26
1.05%
Netherlands
22
0.89%
Japan
21
0.85%
Italy
21
0.85%
Mexico
21
0.85%
India
16
0.64%
South Africa
15
0.60%
Belgium
13
0.52%
Spain
11
0.44%
China
11
0.44%
Vietnam
10
0.40%
Kenya
10
0.40%
South Korea
9
0.36%
Austria
8
0.32%
Brazil
7
0.28%
Israel
5
0.20%
Peru
5
0.20%
Argentina
3
0.12%
Indonesia
3
0.12%
Poland
3
0.12%
Slovenia
3
0.12%
United Arab Emirates
1
0.04%
Norway
3
0.12%
Canada
2
0.08%
Colombia
2
0.08%
Portugal
2
0.08%
Czech Republic
1
0.04%
Hong Kong
1
0.04%
Puerto Rico
1
0.04%
Ukraine
1
0.04%
Singapore
1
0.04%
Switzerland
1
0.04%
Total 2485 100%
156
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