Artifacts of Colonialist Language by Brad MacDonald

I wanted to explore the idea of colonialism through the use of language on The Met’s website. I spoke with a number of museum writers about the language they avoid when writing copy for exhibitions and narrowed the list down to exotic, primitive and Oriental. I was ready to develop a web scraper then realized The Met has a really robust search function on their website that includes filters for department. The results were both unsurprising and surprising. I expected there to reveal usage of these words but was shocked by the prevalence of the word primitive, and that all but 300 of its 3506 uses appears in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas department.