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Biases within Digital Repositories: The Getty Research Portal

The influence of computer science on disciplines outside of itself has constituted hybrid communities of practice, such as the digital humanities (DH) and digital art history (DAH), the latter being an offspring of the former.[1] The questions asked within these interdisciplinary fields are substantially different from those in core computer science fields, such as systems theory, language theory, and theory of computation.[2] As a result of the interdisciplinary nature of their inquiries, research questions pertaining to DH and the ethical challenges that accompany them are diametrically opposed to the empirical and often unambiguous measures of validity to which computer scientists are accustomed. This article will explore ethical questions pertaining to collections aggregation systems from the perspective of postcolonial scholarship and seek paths towards addressing the ethical questions currently facing many DH projects. To do so, I will use the Getty Research Portal (hereafter, “the Portal”) as a case study of a digital repository and draw on my personal experience as a software developer working on the project, as well as on current research on biases and ethics within DH.