I am excited to be leading the AEOLIAN network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations), funded by the New Developments for Digital Scholarship grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). More about the programme here.
The AEOLIAN network project aims to develop artificial intelligence to help improve access to born-digital and digitised cultural records through a collaboration of UK and US partners. I will be working with Claire Warwick, Paul Gooding, Annalina Caputo, Glen Worthey, J. Stephen Downie and Ryan Dubnicek – as well as our Network Participants. Our Project Partners include the National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales; the Wellcome Collection; the History of Parliament Trust; Harvard’s Houghton Library; Yale’s Digital Preservation team and Music Library; Indiana University Libraries; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries; Educopia; Frick Collection (NYC); and Carnegie Museum of Art.
In today’s digital age, most of our documents exist only in digital formats. However, many of the archives for born-digital and digitised collections are currently inaccessible to researchers and other users due to privacy concerns, copyright and other issues. The AEOLIAN network was designed to investigate the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play to make born-digital and digitised cultural records more accessible to users by developing solutions to privacy and copyright obstacles to access.
The network will bring together Digital Humanists, Computer Scientists and stakeholders (including policy makers) to help unlock the cultural assets currently preserved in digital archives, which are closed to the public or provide limited access. AEOLIAN will make a ground-breaking contribution through carefully-structured workshops, innovative research outputs, and the creation of an international network of theorists and practitioners working with born-digital and digitised archives.
For more information and to join the mailing list visit the AEOLIAN website.