Visual digital canon and accessing Russian culture online

We have observed how the digital humanities change, modulate and influence the shape of the literary canon through digital scholarly editions, digitised archives, and online collections. The visual culture embracing the world has been standing on the shoulders of the visual canon which is also changing under the influence of emerging digital repositories. The lecture will examine if this is the case for Russia, a huge country with a diverse history and a range of ethnographic museum collections. In this talk, I will use data from a national survey of 2,300 Russian museums to demonstrate the scope of digitisation across the country, the percentage of online images for museum objects, and the number of museums with English interfaces. I will examine the attempts of international museums and image aggregators to form the Russian digital canon. I will also consider the consequences of forming the canon under the pressure of national agendas (national museums) and concepts of diversity (international aggregators). We may think of a new digital canon as a system built under numerous contradictory influences where taste is, obviously an important (and probably disappearing) component for developing a new visual culture, and we should consider how differing digital access to cultural heritage from different nations and their national collections affects access and scholarly work in the digital age.