Who: Arno Bosse

Topic: A beginner’s introduction to ‘AI for Art Historians’

Short description:

By now, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have permeated many areas of our private lives and are starting to become of value to our professional interests. At the same time, their very ubiquity and apparent seamlessness can make it difficult for us to imagine how to explore AI more experimentally in new contexts. For example, the ability of an algorithm to recognize human faces and poses in a photograph certainly seems relevant to identifying iconographic motifs in a painting. But what, as art historians, can we do with this intuition? How can we evaluate for ourselves what AI might be able to offer to our field? What are the best practices in this area? What are the methodological constraints and pitfalls we need to consider? In short, where do we begin?

The goal of this workshop is to engage with these questions in an informal and non-technical setting. We’ll begin with an introduction of the AI landscape and relevant methods, followed by a review and discussion of representative examples of current research in the field, including methodological challenges. In the second half of the workshop we will experiment with ready-to-use AI tools and demos to acquaint ourselves firsthand with what kinds of results are possible today. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the basic grounding and context to explore this area further on their own, and to approach their digital humanities and computer science colleagues with ideas for collaboration.

Resources, Tools, Projects:

Length: 3 hours (max. 16 participants, laptops recommended but not required).