Dimensions of personhood in cultural heritage: Who (or what) gets to be called a person?

Abstract

We examine the notion of “person” in cultural heritage settings (libraries, museums, and archives) and how this notion has implications for their function and purpose. Variations in the way persons are described, represented, and discussed have taken on new significance in emerging online environments predicated on reusing and sharing data from disparate sources. We start with a representative sample of systems and tools used for organizing knowledge in tangible cultural heritage, including metadata standards, conceptual models, and web data models, and for each, analyze their formal definitions of personhood. We asked what characteristics of a person are important in each of these definitions, and what might be the reasons for any variations among them. An analysis of the definitions themselves revealed five dimensions of personhood: life, actuality, biology, agency, and individuality. Using this framework along with the general literature on personhood we then describe the possible reasons, both historical and practical, for the definitions, their dimensions, and the differences among them. Finally, we speculate on the implications of such differences for emerging information environments.