A new digital humanities project, AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations), is “designed to investigate the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play to make born-digital and digitised cultural records more accessible to users.” The project is funded by the New Directions for Digital Scholarship grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and is intended to “make a ground-breaking contribution to this field through carefully-structured workshops, innovative research outputs, and the creation of an international network of theorists and practitioners working with born-digital and digitised archives.”
Two online workshops for the project will be held later this year. The first workshop “Employing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Institutions will be held on July 7th 12:00 to 17:30 GMT. The Keynote Speaker will be Thomas Padilla, Director of Information Systems and Technology Strategy at the Center for Research Libraries, and guest speakers include Giles Bergel (University of Oxford/National Library of Scotland), Einion Gruffudd (National Library of Wales), John Stack (Science Museum), Maria Estorino (University North Carolina Wilson Library), and John McQuaid, XY Han and Vardan Papyan (Frick Collection). The second workshop, “How can ML/AI help improve visitor-facing experiences?” will be held in October.
Early-career professionals and academics, as well as post-graduate students and non-affiliated researchers, are encouraged to apply. Send completed forms via email to: aeolian@lboro.ac.uk. Successful applicants will be notified. The deadline for application is June 18, 2021.