HAICu

Modern AI techniques such as 'deep learning' provide the promising prospect to interlink and enrich collections, deepening our understanding of the Netherlands' polyvocal past, present, and future. However, developing these Artificial Intelligence techniques is challenging, given the size and heterogeneous nature of the big data heritage collections, the context-dependency of interpretations and the inherent dynamics of ever-growing collections.

In the HAICu project (https://www.haicu.science/), AI and Digital Humanities researchers, heritage professionals and engaged citizens aim for scientific breakthroughs in AI to open up, link and analyze in context large scale and heterogeneous multimodal digital heritage collections to facilitate user-assisted generation of fact-based narratives. Our target groups are all types of users and institutions whose functioning relies on relevant and reliable information. In co-creation with these groups, the HAICu project will develop new methods and user-engineered tools to construct meaningful contexts out of the available big data, assisting users to weigh both historical as well as current multimodal information.

Researchers from the Cultural AI lab will focus specifically on challenges around the construction of polyvocal, multimodal narratives in work package 5. We will investigate transparent access mechanisms that allow users to navigate multi-perspective, multimodal data. Data in HAICu contains a mix of machine learned labels, professional metadata and laymen annotations, each offering a different perspective on a topic.