The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society

Organizing Discoverability: Cultural Goods in the Digital Era

The development of digital platforms and artificial intelligence reflects profound transformations in the infrastructure of cultural production and circulation. The ways in which music, movies, and books are produced and made available to the public have changed dramatically since the late 1990s. In some areas of cultural production, certain cultural goods have proven resistant to the all-powerful digital turn. This is the case with book publishing and the revival of vinyl collecting culture (Česálková 2024; Erickson 2024). Nonetheless, in most cases, material cultural goods have evolved alongside digital formats. The digital era has presented challenges for some forms of cultural production while also creating new strategic opportunities for others.

One of the main characteristics of this new era concerns digital platforms and their role in enabling and constraining the circulation of cultural goods (Valtysson 2017; Damasio et al., 2025). What has emerged from this new landscape is a limited number of dominant players that exert considerable influence over artists, cultural producers, and even states (Roberge and Chantepie 2017). Digital platforms operate on a global scale and have shown resistance to national cultural policies, while demonstrating only limited forms of cooperation with states. They raise a number of important issues for cultural policy, including questions of cultural sovereignty and the capacity of states to continue using traditional policy instruments to support, promote, and regulate cultural sectors (Tchéouali and Agbobli 2025). Another challenge concerns algorithms and new marketing tools designed for users. Such tools bypass traditional forms of cultural promotion. At the same time, digital platforms open access to the world, offering users new opportunities to encounter artworks and cultural heritage that connect them to diverse cultures and perspectives. Yet, is this connection attentive to national contexts and languages, not to mention the place of minority cultures?

This special issue raises the question of discoverability (McKelvey and Hunt 2019; Johnson et al., 2024). How are cultural goods made accessible and recognizable to users in the digital era? More importantly, how are states, arts organizations, and communities organizing and structuring their efforts to shape the accessibility and discoverability of cultural goods? This important question assumes the existence of cultural and linguistic asymmetries in the global circulation of culture and suggests that actors are actively organizing to overcome these challenges.

For this special issue, we are particularly interested in papers that address some of the following issues:

• Organizational processes and strategies: How can discoverability be organized? Beyond the legal and technical dimensions, what are the organizational processes, the practices, or the institutional work that can support enhanced discoverability of cultural goods? How can arts manager shape or manage discoverability from their work and organizations?
• Intellectual histories: The notion of discoverability has become particularly influential in the Francophone world, but also in other parts of the world were discoverability also entails a linguistic dimension. Numerous research programs and policy initiatives have been developed to support the promotion of cultural diversity and the diversity of cultural expressions. What connections exist among these projects? What histories and trajectories have shaped their development? Ultimately, what do we mean by discoverability? How is this notion understood, defined, and mobilized by the various actors involved in shaping and promoting it within the public sphere?
• Intermediaries: Considering contemporary artistic processes and new modes of cultural dissemination, what new intermediaries have emerged to support discoverability? What roles do they play, and what practices have they developed? How does their work contribute to the division of cultural labour that underpins artistic production, circulation, and recognition?
• Cultural policies: What role can cultural policy play in shaping, stabilizing, or promoting governance regimes that support discoverability? We welcome policy analyses, case studies, and critical reviews of existing policies, programs, and regulatory frameworks aimed at enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and discoverability of cultural goods.

References

Česálková, L. (2024). Film heritage on demand? Curation and discoverability of “classic movies” on Netflix. Television & New Media, 25(3), 287-305.

Damásio, M. J., Helen Bengesser, C., Graça, A. R., Primorac, J., Grácio, R., Kauber, S., Pernin, J., Hammoud, P., Materska-Samek, M., & Kotlinska, M. (2025). Audiences, content diversity and streaming platforms in small European countries: Engagement, interaction with catalogues, and choice. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 31(5), 1573-1590. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251361224

Erickson, K. (2024). AI and work in the creative industries: digital continuity or discontinuity?. Creative Industries Journal, 1-21.

Johnson, C., Hills, M., & Dempsey, L. (2024). An audience studies’ contribution to the discoverability and prominence debate: Seeking UK TV audiences’‘routes to content’. Convergence, 30(5), 1625-1645.

McKelvey, F., & Hunt, R. (2019). Discoverability: Toward a definition of content discovery through platforms. Social Media+ Society, 5(1), 2056305118819188.

Roberge, J., & Chantepie, P. (2017). The promised land of comparative digital cultural policy studies. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 47(5), 295-299.

Tchéhouali, D., & Agbobli, C. (2025). État des lieux de la découvrabilité et de l’accès aux contenus culturels francophones sur internet. Étude réalisée par Destiny Tchéhouali et Christian Agbobli, juin 2020. Revue internationale des francophonies, (13).

Valtysson, B. (2017). From policy to platform: the digitization of Danish Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(5), 545-561.