DE-BIAS – Detecting and Cur(at)ing Harmful Language in Cultural Heritage Collections

The EU-funded DE-BIAS project (January 2023 – December 2024) tackles outdated and harmful language in cultural heritage collections. Led by the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, in collaboration with thematic and domain aggregators and technical partners in the Europeana network, DE-BIAS aims to foster inclusivity and respect in digital collections.

DE-BIAS will develop an AI-powered tool to automatically detect problematic terms in metadata. It will provide information on their problematic nature and suggest appropriate alternatives using contextual vocabularies.

These vocabularies will focus on migration and colonial history, gender and sexual identity, and ethnicity and ethnoreligious identity. Collaboratively developed with marginalized communities, these vocabularies empower communities to reshape historical descriptions affected by outdated colonial, patriarchal, and hegemonic structures.

By fostering collaboration, DE-BIAS aims to enhance representation, participation, and inclusivity in museums and archives. It will provide capacity-building workshops and a knowledge base for cultural heritage professionals to address bias in their collections. The project will analyze over 4.5 million records in English, Italian, German, French, and Dutch, including metadata coming from film archives through the European Film Gateway to Europeana.

Derogatory language in item descriptions on Europeana will be automatically identified and flagged. The DFF is looking forward to delivering relevant project findings and results to the ACE membership in due course.

Learn more about the project at https://pro.europeana.eu/.

European Film Gateway DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum

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