Long-term research endeavor: Developing trajectories for critical Cultural Analytics and DH
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2021-05-21

Natalia Grincheva | National Research University “Higher School of Economics” and University of Melbourne, Australia

My presentation will contribute to two important topics of the DH Symposium, such as “Productive failure – Failure as a part of DH praxis” and “Critical cultural studies and analytics.”

First, it will demonstrate a creative-based DH research project Museum Soft Power Map, developed in collaboration with the Australian Center for the Moving Image. This project successfully trialed a first in the world dynamic web application (http://victoriasoftware.com/demo/) that can measure and map museum soft power (Watch a 2 min video demo here). The project employed geo-visualization, data mining and digital storytelling to develop a deep mapping application that can demonstrate museum global influence across six key layers of soft power from mere resources to social outputs to economic outcomes. This system correlates multiple sets of museum collections, visitation, programming and revenue data with demographic statistics and cultural analytics of specific locations, understanding them as politically, culturally, and economically defined locales.

Second, my presentation will address important critique of cultural analytics and DH data-intensive research as a valid methodology to explore different cultural phenomena. Current academic scholarship warned that in many cases DH and data intensive methods substitute knowledge generation and production of theory with mere visualization. For example, Martinho (2018) argued that “visualization becomes a research routine, compensating for the lack of a theoretical framework by reinforcing technological and methodological procedures [… and] produces an effect of naivety.” Sullivan and Wendrich (2015) stressed that GIS presents information in a “distinctly positivist way” by emphasizing the importance of quantitative (rather than qualitative) data and fails to move from “GIS as system to GIS as science.” In response to these concerns, my presentation will discuss how Museum Soft Power Map can be employed as an inductive exploratory research platform to identify, articulate and validate important questions of global cultural, social, and political geography. It will demonstrate the value of the DH cultural analytics platform as a knowledge system to pave an avenue for a long-term research endeavor.


For more information about the 2021 Global DH Symposium visit 2021.msuglobaldh.org.