Digital Culture & Society (DCS) – Vol. 6, Issue 2/2020 – Laborious Play and Playful Work II

The design and use of metadata is always culturally, socially, and ideologically inflected. The actors, whether these are institutions (museums, archives, libraries, corporate image suppliers) or individuals (image producers, social media agents, researchers), as well as their agendas and interests, affect the character of metadata. There is a politics of metadata. This issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the ideological and political aspects of metadata practices within image collections from an interdisciplinary perspective. The overall aim is to consider the implications, tensions, and challenges involved in the creation of metadata in terms of content, structure, searchability, and diversity.

Anna Dahlgren is professor of Art History at Stockholm University. She has written extensively on various aspects of photography and visual culture including fashion and advertising photography, print culture, historiography, the digital turn, archives and museum practices. Recent publications include Travelling Images: Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture (Manchester University Press, 2018), Representational Machines: Photography and the Production of Space (Aarhus University Press, 2013, co-edited), and contributions in Fashion and Museums (Bloomsbury, 2014), Images in Time (Bath University Press, 2011) and Mode: En introduktion (Raster, 2009). She is currently running the project Metadata Culture (Swedish Research Council, 20192023), focusing on different aspects of cultural heritage institutions image collections online.