AI

Europeana Café – AI at the intersection of research and cultural heritage [Mar 25 @ 13:00 CET, online]

Europeana Research Community Café!

Ines Vodopivec, Secretary General of AI4LAM (Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives & Museums)

The Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (AI4LAM) community is an international, participatory organisation committed to advancing the use of artificial intelligence within the cultural heritage sector. It maintains strong collaborative ties with academic institutions – with Stanford and Harvard among its founding members – as well as with cultural heritage organisations such as national libraries and museums.

What’s more, AI4LAM has built a strong collaboration with the Europeana Initiative for the development of AI in the common European data space for cultural heritage, supporting and fostering Europeana Network Association cross‑community work through the Alignment Assembly on ‘Culture for AI’.

AI4LAM stands at the forefront of developing and maintaining cutting‑edge AI tools and services tailored to heritage institutions, enhancing access, management and reuse of digitised and born‑digital content. The community fosters collaboration, innovation and knowledge exchange in the application of AI across institutions worldwide.

In the ENA Research Community Café, we will explore several inspiring use cases of AI in the cultural heritage sector and discover the possibilities that new technologies offer us.

The speaker
Dr Ines Vodopivec, Associate Professor, is deeply committed to advancing digitisation theory and practice within heritage institutions on an international scale. Her notable roles include serving as Deputy Director of the National and University Library of Slovenia, and Vice Dean at Nova University in Ljubljana, being a dedicated member of the UNESCO Memory of the World National Committee, and participating as a member of the IFLA Digital Humanities – Digital Scholarship Committee.
More recently, she assumed the role of Secretary General of AI4LAM, working with the National Library of Norway and Stanford University Library, USA, further solidifying her leadership and influence in the fields of digital heritage and innovative methodologies.
She is also a Management Board Member of the Europeana Network Association and a Steering Group member of the Europeana Research Community.

The FLOW Project: A Modular Workflow for Automatic Text Recognition and Beyond [Feb 18, online @ 15:00 GMT]

The FLOW Project: A Modular Workflow for Automatic Text Recognition and Beyond

Bodleian Bytes

18 February 15:00 to 16:00

Online event. Registration required.

Registration: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/registration-bodleian-bytes-the-flow-project

Historical research often involves working with highly diverse and complex source materials, ranging from handwritten manuscripts to large, heterogeneous document collections. Machine learning methods are increasingly shaping how historians work with digitised sources, particularly through Automatic Text Recognition (ATR). In this talk, Jonas Widmer and Dana Meyer will introduce The FLOW, a modular, microservice-based framework designed to support machine learning–driven data management and processing in the Digital Humanities.

The talk will outline how The FLOW separates complex ATR workflows such as pre-processing, model training, inference, and evaluation into independent, reusable components that can be combined flexibly and accessed without programming experience. Using state-of-the-art transformer-based models, the project aims to make advanced text recognition workflows more transparent, reproducible, and scalable across diverse historical datasets.

Jonas and Dana will outline a typical FLOW workflow, showing how datasets are managed on the Hugging Face platform and then processed step by step. The focus will be on how such workflows can support everyday research practices when working with large and heterogeneous historical corpora.

Speaker Biographies

Jonas Widmer is a Research Software Engineer specialising in Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. In this role, he assists in planning and developing projects focused on Natural Language Processing. His primary interest lies in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), where he engages with historical projects and their diverse sources.

Dana Meyer is a Master’s student in Intelligent Interactive Systems at Bielefeld University and works as a research assistant on the project The Flow in the Digital History group at Bielefeld University

Jonas Widmer

Jonas Widmer

Dana Meyer

Dana Meyer

Bodleian Bytes

Bodleian Bytes is a series of online talks hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries. The series engages with innovative national and international research in digital scholarship. It is a virtual space for discussions surrounding different tools and methodologies whilst also providing inspiration for future digital research.

Event Details and Registration

Registration is required for this free online event. Registration closes at 17.00 on Monday 16 February 2026.

Date and time: Wednesday 18 February, 15:00-16:00 (UK time)

Location: Online via Zoom.

For further information, please email the Centre for Digital Scholarship: cds@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Centre for Digital Scholarship

The Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at the Bodleian Libraries is a space and place for engaging, leading and shaping discussions around digital scholarship practice and research within and beyond the University of Oxford. 

AIRON Event: AI and Research Evaluation [Jan 22, online, 16:00 GMT]

AIRON Event: AI, Research Evaluation, and REF 2029 — What We Need to Understand Now
🗓 22 January 2026 | 🕓 4pm GMT


🔗 Event link: (3) AI, Research Evaluation, and REF 2029: What We Need to Understand Now | LinkedIn

In this session, Mike Thelwall will present recent evidence on how both public models (e.g., ChatGPT) and smaller private models perform when assessing research quality. The discussion draws on REF-evaluated journal articles and also considers where AI may be applied across outputs, impact case studies, environment statements, and pre-publication peer review.

We will also explore a practical, responsible stance: LLMs can be persuasive and still wrong, but when used carefully they may provide supporting insights — for example by averaging multiple outputs and using rankings rather than absolute scores — to support, not replace, expert judgement.

This event is part one of a two-part series. We will continue the conversation in February with a follow-up panel featuring Mike Thelwall, Elizabeth Gadd, and Helen Young.

If you can’t attend live, you can still stay connected:
📩 AIRON newsletter (summary + Q&A): Newsletter sign up page
🔗 AIRON LinkedIn community: (4) AI in Research Operations Network (AIRON) | Groups | LinkedIn

ACDH Lecture: From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering [Jan 20, online, 16:45 CET]

ACDH Lecture: “From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering: The MHDBD and the Future of Semantic Annotation with LLMs” with Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer & Julia Hintersteiner (both Universität Salzburg)


📅 Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
⏰ 16:45 – 18:15


The invited speakers will present the complete technological redesign of the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (hashtag#MHDBDB): After decades of development in relational and RDF-based environments, the project has moved to a TEI-first architecture designed to support LLM-driven research.

The speakers address the key reasons for this shift:
i) the need for structured, AI-readable data;
ii) the practical limits of high-complexity standoff models; and
iii) the excessive resource demands of large-scale RDF infrastructures.

In this context, Large Language Models are reshaping annotation, search, and interpretation. TEI-XML emerges as a sustainable framework for transparent, semantically robust, and interoperable Expert-in-the-Loop workflows, balancing philological rigor with AI scalability.
The talk offers a focused perspective on the evolving technical foundations of text research in the humanities.

More detailed information,

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/newsevents/event-series/acdh-lecture-121

This lecture is jointly organised in close collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) and the University of Vienna and is part of the University’s Digital Humanities Lecture Circuit (WS 2025).

Generating Futures: Using AI to Imagine Sustainable Places [Nov 11-14, in person, Galway]

Generating Futures: Using AI to Imagine Sustainable Places

Dates: 11th – 14th November, 2025

Location: Studio 3, O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance, University of Galway

Can Generative AI help us imagine a more sustainable world? Generating Futures brings together communities, artists, geographers and climate scientists to co-create visions of a sustainable future using the power of AI. Funded by Research Ireland as part of the Science Week 2025 programme, this series of interactive workshops are facilitated by PhD researchers based at the Centre for Creative Technologies.

Workshops:


Reimagining Nuns Island: A Speculative Design Walk

Collect Your Own Small & Local Dataset

Envisioning Future Placemaking through AI Visualisation Technologies

Brain Computer Interfaces and imagination – When Science and Art Meet

Full details and links to registration are available via: https://universityofgalway.ie/creative-tech/collaboration/science-week-2025/

Reference Extraction at the Intersection of AI Research and the Digital Humanities: Validation, Interoperability and Collaboration [Nov 4, hybrid]

Reference Extraction at the Intersection of AI Research and the Digital Humanities: Validation, Interoperability and Collaboration

This informal meeting is meant mainly to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange between researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of data extraction, artificial intelligence, and the digital humanities. In the workshop, we continue to address the challenge of extracting heterogeneous references from texts, particularly from historical documents and humanities or legal scholarship. This second workshop focuses on three key themes emerging from the 2023 discussions:

  1. Validation: How can we evaluate and benchmark the performance of different reference extraction tools and approaches, particularly with large language models?
  2. Interoperability: How can we ensure that different tools, datasets, and workflows can work together effectively through shared data models and formats?
  3. Collaboration: How can researchers, developers, and institutions work together to advance the field of reference extraction?

The program is available online at: https://mpilhlt.github.io/reference-extraction/workshop-2025/programme/

The event will take place in-person and online. Register at https://plan.events.mpg.de/e/refextract25 

A link for online attendance will be sent to registered participants before the event. Also, even if you cannot attend, but want to be informed about updates, materials being made available, etc. you can notify us about this at the registration link.

Programme

Tuesday 04 November 2025

Onboarding

09:00-09:15 Arrival/Registration

09:15-09:45 Christian Boulanger/Andreas Wagner (mpilhlt): Welcome and Upshot from RefExtract2023, State of the Discussion

09:45-10:00 Coffee Break

Research presentations

10:00-12:30

  1. Hiba Arnaout (TU Darmstadt): In-depth Research Impact Summarization through Fine-Grained Temporal Citation Analysis
  2. Yurui Zhu/Matteo Romanello (Odoma): Benchmarking Large Language Models on Reference Extraction and Parsing in the Social Sciences and Humanities
  3. Sofía Aguilar Valdez (Saarland University): How Scientific Ideas Evolve
  4. Open Discussion and Ad-Hoc Presentation of Research

12:30-13:30 Lunch

Datasets, Infrastructure and Interoperability

13:30-15:30

  1. Angelo Di Iorio/Matteo Guenci/Marta Soricetti*/Silvio Peroni/Lorenzo Paolini*/Ivan Heibi (University of Bologna): Citation Extractor and Classifier: Pipeline and Datasets (*presenting)
  2. Tamara Heck/Christoph Schindler/Verena Weimer/Philipp Mayr/Ahsan Shahid (DIPF/GESIS): Open Citation Data for Educational Research
  3. Christian Boulanger, Andreas Wagner (mpilhlt): Datasets in the Legal Theory Knowledge Graph Project
  4. Interoperability Roundtable: Open Discussion on Data Models and Data Formats

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

Tools, Workflows and Pipelines

16:00-17:30

  1. Raphael Schlattmann/Malte Vogl (mpigea)/Aleksandra Kaye (TU Berlin/mpigea): LLM-Based Knowledge Graph Extraction Pipeline
  2. Luca Foppiano (ScienciaLAB): Training the Grobid Reference Extraction Models
  3. Christian Boulanger/Andreas Wagner (mpilhlt): Annotation Tools for Machine Learning: PDF-TEI Editor (for LLamore & Grobid), Prodigy, TEI-Publisher

17:30-18:30 Takeaways, Way Forward, Closing

The Third Thursday – April 2025

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A monthly round-up of DH-related events, webinars, conferences, opportunities & jobs from the DARIAH-IE inbox…

Generative AI and Historical Research: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks – an interdisciplinary workshop convened by Dr Bronagh Ann McShane

Event: May 7, 2025, 9:30 – 14:00 (in person)

This in-person, interdisciplinary workshop brings together historians, social scientists and computer scientists to explore the methodological, ethical, and practical implications of Generative AI in historical research. Through presentations, case studies, and discussions, participants will examine:

  • How to harness AI’s potential while maintaining historical rigour.
  • The role of AI in research workflows (scalability, replicability, and ethical considerations).
  • How AI tools can be trained to recognise historical nuance and context.

Registration: Generative AI and Historical Research

Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

Event: May 14th, 2025 11am (online)

On 29 April 2025 Scottish Universities Press (SUP) will publish its second open access book, Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century edited by James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Sophie Whittle, Bridgette Wessels,  Michael Kurzmeier and Órla Murphy. To celebrate the release of the book SUP are hosting a fireside chat with co-editor Bridgette Wessels and chapter authors Andrew Prescott and Michelle Doran. 

The collection brings together twenty chapters that cover practical design processes of digital editions as well as conceptual approaches to editing born-digital material. It also engages with timely and important topics that are often neglected, including queer approaches to editing, accessibility, editing and publishing in the age of artificial intelligence, and the data edition.  

Registration: SUP fireside chat: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century.

Large Language Models for Digital Humanities Research Summer School

Deadline: 1st June

Event: 8th – 11th September 2025 (in person)

This year’s Summer School on “Large Language Models for Digital Humanities Research“, organized by the University of Cologne’s Competence Area III, in conjunction with the Center for Data and Simulation Science, the Department for Digital Humanities, the Cologne Center for eHumanities, and the Data Center for the Humanities, takes place from 8th – 11th September 2025, at Cologne University (on site).

This summer school addresses MA students and doctoral candidates from Linguistics and Digital Humanities, as well as other fields that focus on the application of LLMs for DH Research. Please Note: Participation in the summer school is free of charge! However, minor costs might occur if specific hardware (e.g. Google Colab) is required during workshops.

Further information and application instructions: http://ml-school.uni-koeln.de/

DHBenelux 2025

Event: 3–6 June 2025

We are excited to announce that registration for DHBenelux 2025 is now open! Join us in Amsterdam from 3–6 June 2025 for our traditional annual conference that brings together the vibrant Digital Humanities community across the Benelux region and beyond.

🎟️ Early bird tickets are available until 7 May 2025 (or until sold out), so make sure to register in time to secure your spot! Authors are required to register. 

🔗 Register here: https://2025.dhbenelux.org/registration/

Announcing the new Heritage, Artificial Intelligence & Law (HAIL) Network

We invite you to join a supportive space for knowledge exchange and collaboration on all things related to heritage, AI and law.   

As recently seen in the UK Copyright & AI Consultation, the heritage sector faces complex issues and lacks meaningful representation in government policy on AI. We have an opportunity to fill that gap. HAIL will be an interdisciplinary space for practitioners, researchers and other advocates in heritage, technology and legal sectors to voice concerns and excitement around the use and development of AI. 

Our goal is to share information, best practice, publications, calls for evidence, consultations, news and other related events. For example, we’ve already started a collaborative list of relevant consultation responses (by the way, let us know if your response is publicly available). By combining forces, we will be better able to organise and enable the diverse voices of the heritage sector to more meaningfully contribute to policy debates  — and at a crucial moment not only for AI regulation, but also for ensuring the sector’s visibility, representation and resilience. 

HAIL is led by Paula Westenberger, as part of her BRAID Fellowship on Responsible AI for Heritage, and supported by a steering group with Harriet Deacon, Bartolomeo Meletti, Anna-Maria Sichani and Andrea Wallace.

To join the HAIL network, subscribe to the listserv at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/HAIL. 

International GLAM Labs Community Annual Report

The first official annual report of the International GLAM Labs Community is now available. We would like to thank all the contributions and suggestions. In addition, we have created a new community in Zenodo in which you will find additional presentations from the International GLAM Labs Community.

Report: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15096604

Zenodo community: https://zenodo.org/communities/glam-labs/) 

AI-Powered Metadata, Hackathons, APIs & Notebooks

Event: 3–6 June 2025 (online)

Registration for the webinar*: https://clirdlf.zoom.us/meeting/register/KN5e8r48Q1G-i8BRUrKGWQ#/registration

*The webinar is kindly hosted by CLIR – Council on Library and Information Resources (https://www.clir.org/) and organised by Olga Holownia. Once you have registered you should receive an email from Olga confirming your registration, a zoom link and how to add the meeting to your calendar.

The agenda for the webinar will include 3 presentations and an opportunity for questions.

ADHO GeoHumanities SIG – community-building and networking event

Event: 1 May 2025 (online)

Recently, we revived the GeoHumanities SIG with a new international group of co-convenors and we write to you today to announce a first community-building and networking event taking place online May 1st.

The GeoHumanities SIG has mainly been known for its mailing list (the GeoHumSIG mailing list), which also runs on ADHO servers. If you are not yet a subscriber to that mailing list it is likely that you’ll have missed a previous announcement of this event. Please consider subscribing here, which is the closest approximation of a ‘membership’ we have for an interest community connected to Spatial and Geo-Humanities within ADHO and beyond, comprising well over 400 current subscribers.

For the community-building event in May we welcome short 3-minute introductions about you and your GeoHumanities work. Whether you are a longtime contributor to this forum or a newcomer, we would like you to let us know about yourself. We suggest that participants prepare 3 slides: 

1- Who you are and what your background is 

2- What your contribution to the field has been in the past 

3- What you are working on at the moment (this could be a submission to ADHO or other current work) + future plans and projects.

We hope you will join us in this small online event to gather as many voices from the community as possible: postgraduate students, early-career researchers, but also experienced scholars and practitioners.

We will take it as an opportunity to reconnect and discuss the future of GeoHumSIG and gather ideas for the in-person pre-conference workshop at this year’s ADHO Annual Conference at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Please sign up for the online community-building and networking event using this short form.

This event will be held on Teams on Thursday May 1, 2025 from 17:00-19:00 GMT.

Report on the Survey “Digitization and Artificial Intelligence for Archives and Documentary Heritage Materials

We are pleased to share the results of a survey exploring how AI is impacting digitization of archives and documentary heritage collections across different institutions. We thank all those who responded to the survey.

Link to the Survey Report

We are a team of researchers from archival, information, and librarianship backgrounds investigating the intersection of digitization and artificial intelligence (AI). 

For comments or questions, please contact the team at e.sengsavang@unesco.org. 

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Cultural Analytics

https://jamesosullivan.github.io/culturalanalytics.html

Proposals are invited for chapters to be included in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Cultural Analytics, a major new reference work that aims to consolidate and extend the field of cultural analytics at a time of considerable methodological innovation and critical reflection.

Cultural analytics—defined broadly as the computational and data-driven analysis of cultural materials—has matured from a set of experimental practices into a dynamic and increasingly central approach across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. This handbook seeks to capture the richness of this moment: to provide scholars, students, and practitioners with a comprehensive, critical, and forward-looking account of the field.

Contributions are welcome from across disciplines, institutions, and methodological traditions, including, but not limited to digital humanities, literary and cultural studies, art history, film and media studies, sociology, linguistics, and computational social science.

Chapters that focus on detailing specific methods are particularly welcome, but contributions are expected to adopt critical perspectives, rather than offering ‘how-to’ guides or focusing exclusively on case studies and accounts of project-based applications. Chapters should interrogate the epistemological, methodological, disciplinary, or infrastructural dimensions of cultural analytics. Prospective authors should consider The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities as an example of what is being sought. The aim is to offer durable, field-defining insights that speak beyond individual projects or tools. Essays will serve as entry points into individual topics and, with this in mind, should be framed broadly. The essay title should speak to the essay’s breadth of coverage.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, along with a short biographical statement to james.osullivan@ucc.ie by May 9th, 2025. Informal enquiries prior to submission are welcome.

Finals chapters will range from approximately 4,000–6,000 words, with manuscripts due in late 2025.

Oral History as Data? Critically approaching the digital turn in method, meaning and recollection

Event: 22 May 2025, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm, UCL (in person)

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) is delighted to welcome Julianne Nyhan, former UCLDH Director and Professor Emeritus of Digital Humanities at UCL, to give the 2025 Susan Hockey Lecture, as the centre celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Oral History is undergoing somewhat of a digital turn. Digital technologies and digital methods are now expanding the range of forms that oral history can take and, potentially, the kinds of questions that we can ask about oral history interview collections.  From an earlier oral history landscape that was constituted of the oral history interview, its analogue or digital recording, its transcript and, potentially, its publication, we are now asking whether oral history can be understood as “data”? What happens when we try to organize or represent the rich and complex experiences shared in an oral history interview using a structured format, like a knowledge graph? And do such changes matter? Or, to put it another way, if we understand oral history as ‘data’, can digital methods be used to analyze it without epistemological loss or consequence?

All welcome but registration is required: https://ucldh-hockey-lecture-2025.eventbrite.co.uk

Computational Humanities Research Conference

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2025 edition of the Computational Humanities Research Conference (CHR 2025), which will take place on December 9–12, 2025, at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg.

In recent years, the arts and humanities have seen a significant increase in the use of computational, statistical, and mathematical approaches. This kind of research is distinguished by its reliance on formal methods and the development of explicit, computational models—ranging from quantitative and statistical techniques to broader computational methods for processing and analyzing data, as well as theoretical reflections on these approaches.

Despite the growing prominence of this field, many scholars still struggle to find suitable venues where they can present and publish computational work while maintaining a strong connection to traditional humanities inquiry. This is precisely the gap that the CHR conference seeks to address.

The deadline for full paper submissions is July 18, 2025. For further details, please consult the full Call for Papers here.

Text Affects Conference

Text Affects conference, University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, 16-18 December.

The topic of this edition is the future of intelligence, a call to reflect on how Text Affects contribute to the development and expression of human and artificial intelligence. 

[CFP] Text Affects 2025 – DEADLINE 15 SEPTEMBER 2025

Submission link: https://openreview.net/group?id=AFFECTS/2025

Call for Papers https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/text-affects/text-affects-2025-2/calls/call-for-papers/

European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” 2025

Deadline: May 18 2025

Event: July 21 – August 2, 2025

Applications to the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” 2025 to be held at the university Marie and Louis Pasteur in Besançon (France) from July 21 to August 2 will open tomorrow 24 of March up to May 18 via Conftool

The Summer University will last for 11 full days with an intensive programme consisting of workshops, teaser sessions, public lectures, regular project presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion. Each workshop consists of a total of 18 sessions or 36 teaching hours. Building on the spirit of previous editions in Leipzig and Cluj, the ESU in Besançon aims at being a space for interdisciplinary collaboration and opportunities for scholars and students in Humanities and therefore strengthening the community of practice already established in past years.

The ESU is sponsored by DARIAH with 12 scholarships of 450 Euros each to partially cover the costs of registration and staying in Besançon as well as by CLARIN for the organization of a workshop and of a conference. 

For all relevant information please consult our website which will be continually updated and integrated with more information as soon as it becomes available. To get some insight into what you can expect from the European Summer University please consult the archive section on our website.

Celtic and Latin glossing traditions: uncovering early medieval language contact and knowledge transfer (GlossIT)

Deadline: 12 May 2025

The “Celtic and Latin glossing traditions: uncovering early medieval language contact and knowledge transfer (GlossIT)” ERC-CoG-project at the University of Graz is hiring a Digital Humanities postdoctoral researchers for four years. Candidates should have experience with digital editions and philological/linguistical projects. Furthermore, they should be familiar with Natural Language Processing and Text Reuse tools. 

https://jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/9a9b957f-510d-f070-8eef-67f92298cad3

The position will be available from 1 June 2025 (starting date negotiable). Deadline for applications is 12 May 2025.

For more information on the GlossIT project, see: https://glossit.uni-graz.at/en/

Lecturer in Digital Humanities

Deadline: 9 May 2025

The Institute for Digital Humanities in Göttingen (Germany) is seeking to fill a permanent position as Lecturer in Digital Humanities (E13 (wage grade according to the public sector pay agreement TVöD)/50%) starting on 1 July 2025. Further information can be found here: https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.html

Complementary to this, a second position (E13 (wage grade according to the public sector pay agreement TVöD)/50%) is available in the ForContext project (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.html). It is of course possible to apply for both positions.

Particular research focuses on digital image and artefact studies, computer linguistics, computational literary studies and digital palaeography. At the IfDH, historical data from antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times are currently being researched in text, 2D, 3D and 4D formats. We would be delighted if you would enrich our team with your expertise.

ECHOES Project (European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science)

The development in ECHOES contributes to the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) – a shared platform, designed to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data, scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools.  ECHOES is currently conducting a “Consultation” in the form of a questionnaire to gather insights from cultural heritage stakeholders. As partner of the ECHOES Project, the Austrian National Library strongly encourages representatives of the Humanities to participate in this initiative and share the consultation within their networks. 

  • How to participate? The questionnaire incl. a short explaining video can be accessed here: ECHOES Consultation 
  • Who can participate?  All cultural heritage stakeholders, including professionals, researchers, computer scientists, developers, institutions, and umbrella organisations. 
  • When is the deadline? The questionnaire will remain open until 30 April 2025. 
  • With your contribution, we will be able to set up the Cultural Heritage Cloud with and for the GLAM-Community. We would be grateful for your support in spreading this with your professional networks. If this topic has already reached you through one of our many project partners, we apologize for any duplication.

Culture, Data and the Humanities in the Age of AI – Seminar (Dublin)

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The use of machine learning to study patterns of cultural and social change has developed very rapidly in the last decade and the insights from this kind of research are urgently needed in a context where AI tools are rapidly proliferating, raising issues of ethics, trust and epistemology. In this context, this half day colloquium will reflect on the experience of collaborative research between data science and the humanities and the potential it offers for new insights, resources and methodologies. It will hear from researchers on two milestone projects, reflecting on the nature of their collaboration, lessons for future research and reflecting with Irish researchers on the collaborative path forward.

The Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles Archive at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles brought together an international team of art historians, media analysts, architects, urban planners, information specialists and software engineers with Getty staff to document, interpret, and debate the Streets of Los Angeles Archive, which was created by the artist Ed Ruscha beginning in 1965 and continuing over the subsequent fifty years.

Living with Machines was a flagship collaborative humanities and science research initiative at the Alan Turing Institute, bringing together historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, library professionals, and curators to examine the human impact of industrial revolution. Developing new tools, methods and resources it exemplifies the capacity to analyse at scale and produce new insights and analysis through such collaboration.

Speakers: Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen), Dr. Emily Pugh (Getty Research Institute), Prof. Mark Shiel (King’s College London), Dr. Katherine McDonough & Dr. Daniel Wilson (The Alan Turing Institute)

More information:

This event is co-organised by the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, and will feature visiting speakers from the Getty Research Institute and the Alan Turing Institute.

Venue: UCD Conway Lecture Theatre (B039), University College Dublin
Date: 7th March 2025
Time: 12.00-16.30

Registration here.

Doing AI Differently – Workshop (UK)

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The Doing AI Differently initiative challenges traditional approaches to AI development by positioning humanities perspectives as integral—rather than supplemental—to technical innovation.

London Workshop, Date & Venue:

  • Date: Thursday, 13 March 2025, 10am-4pm
  • Location: The Royal Academy of Engineering (Prince Philip House), London SW1
  • Working group sessions: continue on Friday, 14 March 2025, 10am-4pm
  • Aligned with the Alan Turing Institute’s major annual conference (AIUK) on 17-18 March

The workshop is an early opportunity to discover and help to refine the research vision and topic scope for an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC–UKRI) International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) funding call launching April 2025. This call will focus on UK, US and Canadian collaborations.

Core Challenges

1. Developing Interpretive Technologies.

Leveraging current AI architectures to implement deeper interpretive capabilities, developing approaches to represent multiple perspectives and capture semantic depth while maintaining computational tractability.

2. Exploring Alternative AI Architectures.

Exploring fundamentally new approaches to AI design that move beyond current limitations in foundation models and gradient-based learning to enable more pluralistic and culturally adaptive AI systems.

3. Advancing Human-AI Ensembles

Moving beyond simple substitution or assistance models, to foster new relationships between human and artificial intelligence, each contributing unique capabilities to achieve outcomes neither could accomplish alone.

Initiative Objectives:

1. Develop pilot projects demonstrating humanities-driven technical advances in AI

2. Establish funding mechanisms fostering interdisciplinary partnerships

3. Create scalable pathways for humanities scholars to participate in large-scale AI projects

Expected Outcomes:

– New paradigms for addressing complex, context-dependent tasks in AI

– Enhanced AI tools for deep contextual analysis across disciplines

– AI systems better aligned with societal values and ethical considerations

The rapid advances in increasingly sophisticated AI systems makes this timing critical, and we seek to develop inclusive, research-led ideas that will provide practical ways to address some of the recommendations set out in the recent UK Government AI Opportunities Action Plan. This initiative adds the opportunities for research and innovation in AI – artificial intelligence – in the UK (see Transforming our world with AI).

More Information:

  • View our complete vision statement: doingaidifferently.org
  • To attend please complete an expression of interest HERE by 17 February 2025. We will be in touch to confirm your attendance by 19 February 2025.
  • A limited number of bursaries are available to support travel costs for participants who do not have other institutional support. See expression of interest form for details.
  • Capacity for the in-person workshop is limited. The workshop will also be available to stream online, with some opportunities for interaction for remote participants. 
  • A list of recommended hotels is available on request.