Social Science Research Council

As cultural objects are digitized, stored, mediated by databases and networks, filtered by search engines, and shaped by software and technology design, culture itself becomes available in new ways. The spread of digital technologies is underwriting a rich and growing yet very uneven redeployment of expressive work, from music to literature to film. This redeployment is transforming our capacity to know, experience, and participate in culture, from seemingly simple issues about what we can access and share to more subtle questions about how this new cultural field is represented: e.g., what kinds of cultural activity are made visible and invisible through databases and search engines, and to whom. Despite the importance of this transformation, we are only beginning to ask serious questions about its characteristics, patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and implications for the future.

In 2003 and 2004, the Digital Cultural Institutions Project supported research on institutions involved in aggregating digital cultural resources and developing models of access to them. It promoted the integration of knowledge on a range of providers and mediators of digital cultural goods and services-from digital libraries and online museums to commercial online vendors of music and books, search engines and portals, open and collaborative knowledge archives, and file-sharing networks, among others.

DCIP worked toward a more comprehensive understanding of the emerging institutional landscape of digital culture and toward a clearer account of the choices we face as participants and stakeholders in that culture. In so doing, it will contribute to what is arguably the most important and most impoverished cultural conversation of our time: that of understanding the practical requirements of an equitable, creative, and sustainable digital cultural future, in the U.S. and across an increasingly global cultural network.

2004 activities included a competitive summer award program (see awardees on the right). The competition attracted 44 candidates for seven awards. About 30 reviewers generously contributed to the selection process. Awardees participated in a fall workhop at Santa Clara University.

Funding for this work was provided by the Creativity and Culture unit of the Rockefeller Foundation.