WORLD'S LARGEST MUSEUM: GOOGLE ART PROJECT COLLECTION

+Which collection would you like to examine as a museologist?

-Google Art Project's collection.

+OMG! Does Google have a museum?

-Doesn't it..?

The fact that people still expect a "structure" and seek physical experience when it comes to museums is unfortunately not a "thinking structure" suitable for the concept of G11N (short form Globalization). Google Art Project, more commonly known as Google Arts & Culture, has brought together the collections of more than 2000 museums, art galleries and cultural institutions, making it accessible from anywhere in the whole world. While most museums with a structure don't have a mission and vision - we still discuss them in sessions - Google Arts & Culture does:

"Preserve and bring the world’s art and culture online so it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere."

We call it the world's largest museum because the common question of the articles on Google Arts & Culture is: "How Does the World's Largest Museum Work?"

What comes to mind when you see the "Google"?

A search engine, trending searches etc.

Well, do you think of googol and googolplex? Maybe you know or maybe not, the origin of Google's name actually emerged from this concept during a brainstorming session. The term googol was coined in 1938 by the American mathematician Edward Kasner and his nephews Edwin and Milton Sirotta, in the book in which the aforementioned concepts were introduced: Mathematics and the Imagination. I am currently in the process of translation, including this book. It is said that :), "1 Googolplex 'is composed of 'zeros' as many as one following googol', it will not be possible to write or record this number with the decimal system, even if all known paper in the universe becomes ink or hard disk." 
So, what about memex? Memex is the name of the hypothetical electromechanical device that Vannevar Bush described in his article "As We May Think" in 1945. One was planned to use Memex as an automated personal filing system. The name Memex was formed from the combination of the words memory and expansion. Memex influenced the development of hypertext systems and eventually led to the creation of the World Wide Web (www) and personal knowledge base software. 

Its connection to our topic is... Martin R. Kalfatovic, associate director of Smithsonian Libraries and Programs, drawing on his more than two decades of experience in digital libraries and information technology focusing on information management, data access, digitization, he prepared the "Converging on Learning Theory" for the 40th Conference on Learning Theory (COLT-conference) held in Washington DC in 2007: "Converging on the Universal Library: From Memex to Googolplex" as a result of another research... Now, from Googolplex to Google... It's a purposeful logical name for a search engine. However, the part that interests us is Google Arts & Culture. So it's actually Googolplex Arts & Culture as you look at it with awareness. If it is impossible and difficult to give examples of numbers that can be closely compared with googolplex in the physical world, what can we say about the size of the collections when we consider that Google Arts & Culture has digitized the selected collections of over 2000 cultural and artistic institutions and this number is increasing day by day, even hourly? The part we call the process of digitization of collections; Art Camera, Museum View and Tabletop Scanner technologies are used and it is a process that is worked on from the ground up in the Google labs with teams of engineers, artists, curators and software experts who do creative coding (I saw those who translate something weird into TR...) and the result. Of course, the lab does not only consist of the digitalization process, they offer the audience (please don't say visitors anymore) experiences in 18 different categories; AR, AI, Android, Web VR... and many more.

So how did this idea come into existence?
Cover photograph: Amit Sood, director of the Google Cultural Institute via Yonhap

In 1999, Amir Sood, director of the Google Culture Academy, returns to India from New York. He excitedly begins to tell about the local museums he visited during his travels and he starts to describe different structures but realizes that the excitement of what he tells does not pass to the other person. If he wanted to open it on the internet and show what he said, such an access was out of the question at that time. Naturally... The part we call the big idea comes into play at this point. It's 2011 when Amir Sood's idea turned from a small spark to a huge ball of fire. Google Arts & Culture, formerly known as Google Art Project, is starting with the process of informing internet users about artworks and creating virtual collections in partnership with 17 famous museums. Think about it, from 17 museums to 2000...

In our two previous articles, we mentioned that the Smithsonian is in a silo effect and looking for a way out, as it has 155.5 million collectibles, 163,300 cubic feet of archival material and more than 2.2 million library volumes. So, how can the silo effect be dealt with in digital collections? Even if the size of the collections and the technologies in digitization are not a problem for now, what will we be facing in the coming years? The biggest problem is "translation issue in the lingua franca", which I posed as a question and underlined in our interview with François Mairesse. The digitization of collections is not yet a solution to the issue of common language access and common terminology in collections. Moreover, we are now in a process where transcreation and localization studies should be carried out jointly rather than translation. In a foreign session I attended recently, the following sentence was used: "When the audience cannot make sense of the information, they have to turn to the aesthetics of the object and the architecture of museums." Of course... What do you think from the concept of "selfie in museums" to the quite amazing museum photos circulating via social media :) 

Let's think about it... The audience, travels from one country to another for the purpose of doing a cultural tour or as a result of PR activities based on the concept of G11N (Example: Beyoncé & Jay-Z's clip in the Musée du Louvre -that year the clip was released in the museum, it ended up setting a new visitor record-, direct association with the museum due to the use of Mona Lisa in many visualization elements of the museum, The Met's famous 'stairs', also known as 'Gossip Girl stairs', those who want to see the place where the Met Gala's red carpet is located etc., including many popular reasons) goes to the museum for some reason. *The Met Gala has been held annually since 1948 and is known as one of the most special and biggest charity nights in New York (Mett Ball). *The subject of The Met Stairs, it emerges from the characters of Gossip Girl (youth series about the life of the wealthy people of the Upper East Side), which is considered an iconic TV series in the world, sitting on the stairs of The Met every lunch break and eating their meals. The fact that the stairs of The Met were not left empty and occupied for a long time by the worldwide fans of the series was also on the agenda many times. Isn't there a youth series for our Istanbul Archeology Museums stairs :) Anyway, back to our topic: The audience goes to the museum for a reason and doesn't understand the language in the written texts and the other language options offered either (they do not have to) or the foreign language level is not enough to make sense of the information (it's normal too, there is no obligation in this matter), and if they are trying to read the curatorial text, just woe :) Then the audience says, I don't understand what it is, at least I've come this far, let me have a photo :)

And now, regarding translation studies issues, will Google Arts & Culture collaborate with Google Translate... We hope it does. Google Lab: Translation Studies, after Louvre Abu Dhabi, why not :)