In this talk, Professor Anna Näslund will adress the platformization and datafication of picture collections from an informational infrastructural perspective, meaning how both textual and visual information is organized, classified, and made accessible. While the transformation from analogue to digital archives has typically been framed around issues such as ‘big data’ or biases in visual contents, I will instead discuss how or in what ways this tranformation qualitatively changes the archive, how digitization may alter the way we conceive of picture archives, particularly photographic archives, and of photographs as such. Drawing on three recent studies based on museum and library collections in Scandinavia, I will exemplify how information infrastructures shapes not only the accessibility and searchability of images but, on a more profound level, how images are understood as sources of information.
Organised by Professor Stephen Whiteman, Professor of the Art and Architecture of China, and Dr Meredyth Winter, Lecturer in Early Islamic Arts, as part of the 2025-26 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘ART HISTORY X COMPUTER VISION: Reflecting on the past in a digital era’.
Speaker:
Anna Näslund is professor of Art History at Stockholm University and researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. She has written extensively on various aspects of photography and visual culture, the digital turn, archives, and museum practices. Recent research projects include The Politics of Metadata and Sharing the Visual HeritageÌý°Ú2019-2023,Ìý] and Selling Pictures: Pictorial Economy and Commoditization, 1820–2020 (2025-2027). Recent publications include Critical Digital Art History. Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, co-edited with Amanda Wasielewski (Intellect, 2024) and Politics of Metadata,  SI Journal of Digital Culture & SocietyÌý(2,Ìý2020).
