{"id":2061,"date":"2026-10-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/?page_id=2061"},"modified":"2026-10-12T14:42:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T13:42:14","slug":"ecr26-guang-yang","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/dariah-ie-ecr-bursary-blogs\/ecr26-guang-yang\/","title":{"rendered":"ECR26 – Guang Yang"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Guang Yang<\/strong>, MA Student, University College Cork<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re excited to present the third post<\/strong> of our special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE\u2019s 2026 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event<\/a>, which took place in Rome, Italy in May 2026. As well as attending the event and benefiting from the networking and learning it offered, the awardees were given the opportunity to provide a short blog about their own work to share with fellow Irish Digital Arts and Humanities researchers on the DARIAH-IE website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the posters and presentations mentioned by Guang can be found in DARIAH’s Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement<\/a><\/strong> community collection on Zenodo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Headshot<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Guang standing beside his poster at the DARIAH Annual Event in Rome<\/em> [Photo Credit: Joan Murphy CC-BY]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blog post by Guang Yang<\/strong>, MA Student, University College Cork<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was delighted to receive the DARIAH-IE ECR bursary to attend the DARIAH Annual Event 2026 in Rome, Italy. The conference was lively and welcoming, with formal presentations complemented by coffee breaks, poster sessions, and informal discussions. Over four days, I attended presentations on AI, digital archives, cultural heritage, and computational methods in the humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I presented my poster, \u201cPhyto-Vision: A Reproducible Workflow for the Computational Excavation of Global Botanical Iconography<\/a>\u201d, during the poster session. Held alongside the coffee breaks, the poster session provided a relaxed setting for chatting with other conference participants. Presenting my poster gave me the opportunity to exchange ideas with researchers working on a wide variety of Digital Humanities projects. I also spoke with other poster presenters and learnt about useful tools and approaches for designing posters and communicating technical work more effectively. One poster that caught my attention was about the Biblissima platform. I was especially interested in how Biblissima brings together resources from multiple institutions through shared standards and interoperable metadata. This offered a valuable perspective on the challenges of building research infrastructures across distributed cultural heritage collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the sessions I attended, one that particularly resonated with me was \u201cIterative Layout Detection training for Digitising Swedish Medical Periodicals (1781\u20132011): Fine-Tuning Layout Detection Models in the SweMPer Pipeline\u201d, which introduced an iterative workflow for training layout detection models for historical documents, offering a practical example of how annotation and model development can evolve together. Their use of the computer vision platform Roboflow and a human-in-the-loop annotation strategy strongly resonated with my own research. I was particularly interested in how they progressively improved their system, first by refining a Mask R-CNN\u2013based model through iterative annotation and later by adopting the more recent Co-DETR model. Their transition from Mask R-CNN to Co-DETR also encouraged me to explore DETR-based object detection models in my own work. Their approach to layout detection also provided useful ideas that may be applicable to my own research on historical books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The talk \u201cFrom Human-in-the-loop to Human-in-control. Leveraging scholarship to enhance AI integration in Museums\u201d also resonated with me. Their use of YOLO-based object detection and a CLIP-based system closely aligns with my research workflow. Beyond the technical aspects, what I found most valuable was their human-centred methodology, which emphasises scholarly oversight throughout the AI workflow. I also appreciated their view that annotation is not merely a technical step for training models, but an interpretative scholarly activity that shapes the knowledge produced by AI-assisted research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another highlight was Dr. Adriana Iezzi\u2019s presentation \u201cChinese Contemporary Calligraphy and Digital Humanities in Dialogue\u201d. This was the first time I learnt about Dr. Iezzi\u2019s research on contemporary Chinese calligraphy. Previously, I had viewed contemporary Chinese calligraphy as a rather controversial subject among traditional calligraphy practitioners. Her research gave me a more thorough and comprehensive view of the history of Chinese contemporary calligraphy. It was fascinating to learn how her research connects contemporary Chinese calligraphy with visual arts, the performing arts, decorative and applied arts, and even graffiti, and to learn about the WenDAng digital archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking across these sessions, I was encouraged to see that many projects combined advanced AI methods with careful human scholarship. The conference reminded me that successful Digital Humanities research is not only about developing better computational tools, but also about applying them thoughtfully to answer meaningful humanities questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Biographical note<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guang Yang<\/strong>, MA Student, University College Cork<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guang Yang <\/strong>is an MA student in Digital Arts and Humanities at University College Cork. His research applies multimodal computational methods to historical botanical works, focusing on the visual and material structures of illustrated knowledge. His poster, \u201cPhyto-Vision: A Reproducible Workflow for the Computational Excavation of Global Botanical Iconography\u201d, has been accepted for presentation at the DARIAH Annual Event 2026. His work examines how botanical images shaped the circulation and organisation of knowledge across global traditions, engaging debates around visual epistemology and data modelling in digital humanities. He develops computational workflows using computer vision, vision\u2013language models, and visual analytics to analyse and interpret large collections of digitised illustrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Guang Yang, MA Student, University College Cork We\u2019re excited to present the third post of our special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE\u2019s 2026 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees. DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event, which took place in Rome, Italy in May … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2079,"parent":1230,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["entry","page","publish","author-joan-y-murphytcd-ie","post-2061","has-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9zaVM-xf","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2061"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2174,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2061\/revisions\/2174"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}