The impact of the digital age on knowledge formation

This thesis analyses the impact of the digital world, specifically of recent developments in the field of metadata, on art knowledge formation. After defining knowledge formation as “any activity by which someone learns something he or she has not known before, even if others have”, the currently on-going debate surrounding metadata was addressed. From this, the conclusion was drawn that metadata, both human readable and computer-readable, makes data easier to find and thus easier to cluster, which could assist (art) knowledge formation. To test if this theoretical conclusion held itself in the real world, a case study was conducted into Artsy, a platform with artworks that says to be using weighed tags called genes to create new and innovative linkages in its dataset, hence aiding art knowledge formation. From content analysis of a variety of materials and manual analysis of a number of networks it was found that Artsy is still presenting artists and artworks in ways relatively close to classical art history texts, albeit with a focus on the visual contextualisation of artworks. The networks found in the sample do not present any really innovative linkages. Answering the research questions then, it was firstly concluded that the Artsy algorithm does, in theory, facilitate new knowledge associations and art clusters, but that Artsy does not yet employ this possibility because the company only adds a small amount of metadata to each artist and allows the system to only depict a very limited number of related artists and related genes. Secondly, addressing the second sub question on how expertise was valued at Artsy, it was concluded that expertise was being valued in association with accredited, high-quality sources and institutions, rather then through training and formal education. Expertise, in short, played a role in Artsy that it was valued as a craft rather then a lesson learned. With this, the main research question ‘how the digital age has impacted art knowledge formation’ was answered saying that, on the one hand the digital age has created new, more efficient IT infrastructures, thus allowing for more versatile access to different forms of expertise and, on the other hand, that metadata allows for more diverse and innovative ways of knowledge formation. Artsy however has only taken a few hesitant steps down this path, adding only a minimum layer of information to content as it is already available in classical scources. Other institutions (or Artsy itself) might in the future make more use of the possibilities available, though future research will have to look into that.