AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations) will offer an upcoming online workshop, Making More Sense With Machines: AI/ML Methods for Interrogating and Understanding Our Textual Heritage in the Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. Hosted by University of Illinois and the HathiTrust Research Center, this workshop will be held November 29-30 from 10am – 2pm Central Time. From the event page:
Our cultural heritage includes texts in the widest imaginable variety of subjects, including not only the humanities and arts, but also in the natural and social sciences; likewise, our largest digital libraries – including that of the HathiTrust (and its Research Center, which hosts this workshop) – consist of legacy documents in practically all areas of human thought and creativity.
These digitized heritage libraries represent some special challenges both to computational study in general, and to emerging AI/ML approaches in particular: digital library documents are much longer, often by orders of magnitude, and much more diverse, than most of the training sets and algorithms that have been at the foundation of modern machine learning.
This workshop, the fifth in the series, will focus on the work of interrogating documents of many types and scope, with the aim of unlocking their data and making it more accessible and more computable. Our shared goal is to make our heritage digital collections in all subject areas richer and more usable through the application and enhancement of computational methods both old and new.
Speakers and topics include:
- Jill Naiman (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Document Layout Analysis for Scientific Article Figure & Caption Extraction
- Hema Natarajan (Benetech), AI for accessibility of STEM textbooks: PageAI & Math Detective
- Ben Schmidt (Nomic AI), How small can big data get? HathiTrust Extracted Features at the bit level
- Peter Organisciak (University of Denver), Neural Nets to Identify Work Relationships in HathiTrust
- Nikolaus Parulian (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Algorithmically Identifying Paratext in HathiTrust
Advance registration is required.