AI and Heritage Collections: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities

Emerging AI practices within the Cultural Heritage Sector (CHS) are generally promising and include various domains spanning image and textual analysis, classification, and user experience. However, technologies adopted by the CHS are often led by private companies, leading to tools such as those using AI being inscribed with specific epistemologies, perspectives, priorities, and consequences that are dissonant with institutions where they are adopted. AI development is rarely driven by professional principles grounded in the CHS. This fails to recognize that this could serve as the basis for a more humane and meaningful driven AI development. Thus, this workshop sets out to explore conceptually and through design practice the integration of principles, priorities, and problematics of archival sciences into AI.

By exploring this area with the conference community, we hope to be able to articulate some of the practices to further contribute to our ongoing effort in facilitating more meaningfully driven AI development in CHS.

To achieve the proposed aims the workshop addresses following research questions:

– What would AI-based approaches on heritage principles look like?

– What possibilities do they suggest about humane AI development?

– How design thinking could help practitioners become part of the ongoing development of

AI approaches?

The workshop will take two hours and be empirical and design oriented. It will consist of 2 modules: a sensitizing session which will lift critical issues that could be relevant to the topic of AI in CHS and a brainstorming/designing session which will allow the participants to articulate central cultural heritage principles and to engage in early stages of a design process to come up with tangible ideas that could be implemented in their institutions.

Application requirements

To participate in the workshop please submit a 2-page motivational letter explaining how your expertise is relevant to the topic and what you hope to get out of workshop participation via email to Paulina.rajkowska@abm.uu.se . This will allow us to customize the sensitizing session to the relevant participants and chose an interdisciplinary group that could thrive in discussion. We are aiming to accept a group of around 10-15 participants. The workshop will not be connected to a call for papers or other forms of publications.

Please note that in order to participate in this workshop you must also register for the conference via the event page. Registration for the conference opens on 15 August.

Deadline 31 September 2023

Organizing Committee

Paulina Rajkowska: Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala (CDHU), Department of ALM, Uppsala University, Sweden. Workshop contact person, please contact via Paulina.rajkowska@abm.uu.se

Anna Foka, Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala (CDHU), Department of ALM, Uppsala University, Sweden.

Gabriele Griffin, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden.

Dalia Ortiz Pablo, Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala (CDHU), Department of ALM, Uppsala University, Sweden.