Cultural heritage institutions in Europe and beyond have been undertaking work to describe and catalogue the historical objects in their collections for decades. However, once created, catalogue data are rarely updated to reflect changes in language and society. As a result, many object and collection descriptions that once fit into popular social narratives now convey outdated views that not only ignore and therefore alienate a wide range of people, but in some cases use language that is offensive, inappropriate or even harmful.
The DE-BIAS project aims to promote a more inclusive and respectful approach to the description of digital collections and the telling of stories and histories of minoritised communities. Over the course of two years, the project will develop an AI-powered tool to automatically detect problematic terms in cultural heritage metadata and provide information about their problematic background. It will use vocabularies that combine offensive language with contextual information and suggestions for appropriate terms.
These vocabularies will focus on three themes: migration and colonial history; gender and sexual identity; and ethnicity and ethnoreligious identity. They will be developed in collaboration with the affected marginalised communities by giving them the space and agency to change the way that cultural artefacts have previously been described due to outdated colonial, patriarchal and hegemonic structures. By enabling bottom-up work with marginalised communities, DE-BIAS seeks to improve the representation and participation of people who feel that museums and archives don’t speak of them or, worse, are not for them.
The project aims to analyse more than 4.5 million records in five different European languages currently published on the Europeana website and to automatically detect and flag item descriptions that contain derogatory language.
