Call for Proposals! 
Fantastic Futures 2025: AI Everywhere, All at Once
AI4LAM’s annual conference, December 3 – 5, 2025, #britishlibrary London
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Excited to announce the themes for @AI4LAM 's Fantastic Futures 2025 conference, with @nfitzger and @ratanass for @BL_DigiSchol : https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2025/03/fantastic-futures-2025-ff2025-call-for-proposals-.html
'The Public Interest Corpus is focused on developing large-scale, high-quality AI training data from the world’s memory organizations that serve the public interest.' It's a 'counterbalancing project ... that will be structured to consider the views of all stakeholders, including authors, publishers, researchers, technologists, and stewards of collections'
https://publicinterestcorpus.org/the-public-interest-corpus-an-update-and-opportunities-for-co-development/
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/12/05/developing-a-public-interest-training-commons-of-books/ #AI #AI4LAM
publicinterestcorpus.orgThe Public Interest Corpus: An Update and Opportunities for Co-Development – The Public Interest Corpus
I love the Fantastic Futures 2024 conference page https://www.nfsa.gov.au/fantastic-futures-conference-canberra-2024 - all the #AI4LAM presentations! From big questions of culture and gender in machine learning / AI to practical examples of transcription, search for text, audio, video, images in museums, libraries and archives as at October 2024
From @thomassmits posting on bluesky @thomassmits.bsky.social:
Making Victorian visual culture searchable: Introducing an open-access and AI-powered dataset of 72,000 illustrations from the Illustrated London News (1842-1890) (w. Bethany Warner,
@pfyfe.bsky.social and @bcgl.bsky.social )
https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/johd.284
A 'Flask application enables scholars to use both textual and visual queries to search the 72,000 images' https://github.com/tpsmi/ilnmultimodalsearch
Code for extraction and multimodal AI embeddings: https://github.com/tpsmi/multimodaliln
Journal of Open Humanities DataA Fully-Searchable Multimodal Dataset of the Illustrated London News, 1842–1890 | Journal of Open Humanities DataThe Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) aims to be a key part of a thriving community of scholars sharing humanities data. The journal features peer reviewed publications describing humanities research objects or techniques with high potential for reuse. Humanities subjects of interest to JOHD include, but are not limited to Art History, Classics, History, Library Science, Linguistics, Literature, Media Studies, Modern Languages, Music and musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, etc. Submissions that cross one or more of these traditional disciplines are particularly encouraged.
Some great 'questions to ask before using AI' including:
Is the answer to my problem predictable from previous data?
Is the AI tool a good fit for my problem?
What are the consequences of an incorrect prediction?
Is the tool compliant with relevant regulations?
I'd add: do I know what problem I'm trying to solve 'with AI' and what success looks like?
https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/thinking-using-ai-solve-problem-here-are-eight-questions-you-need-ask-first #AI #MachineLearning #AI4LAM
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And if you'd like to explore AI in libraries, museums and archives, the AI4ALM community is an excellent place to start https://ai4lam.org/ - regular online seminars (community calls), annual conferences, email lists and Slack #AI4LAM
ai4lam.orgai4lamAI4LAM is an international, participatory community focused on advancing the use of artificial intelligence in, for and by libraries, archives and museums.
New on AI4Culture: 'Recipes are curated guides that provide step-by-step instructions on how to use and combine different features of AI tools and other resources to solve complex tasks' https://ai4culture.eu/resources?page=0&resourceType=RECIPE
ai4culture.euAI4Culture
My DigiKult keynote has just gone live!
'Hold steady: centering the human in the hype of AI' was my view of the potential and pitfalls for AI in libraries, museums and archives as of early October 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voDWMB-903k&list=PLKrB8_QR_fyHm79rosJ8LDZOjiri07JXR&index=8 #AI #AI4LAM #MuseTech #MachineLearning #GLAMTech
How might libraries use machine learning / AI to enrich collections, making them more findable and usable in computational research? Some examples from the British Library https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2024/12/ai-and-machine-learning-etc-with-british-library-collections.html #AI #MachineLearning #AI4LAM #ResponsibleAI
AI in libraries livestream from the National Library of Spain CENL event #AI #AI4LAM #MuseTech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUhOjsNXp5c
HT @nfitzger
(CENL is a network of 46 national libraries in 45 European countries)
At the National Library of Spain for a #CENL AI Network workshop where we're hearing updates about national & European activity: https://www.cenl.org/networkgroups/ai-in-libraries-network-group/ #AI #AI4LAM
Adding to my To Read list, TaNC report 'Unlocking the Potential of Digital Collections. A call to action' https://zenodo.org/records/13838916 #MuseTech #AI4LAM
ZenodoUnlocking the Potential of Digital Collections. A call to actionThis document presents the policy recommendations of Towards a National Collection (TaNC), a five-year, £18.9 million investment in the UK’s world-renowned museums, archives, libraries and galleries, with funding provided through UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priorities Fund and delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The recommendations detail an end-to-end process, with case-study examples and supported by detailed training materials, which we ask UK cultural heritageinstitutions and their funders to adopt to help build a unified UK digital collection.
Replied in thread
@alerdyn hello! The venue doesn't have the facilities for that, but if I have time I'll blog about it for https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/
If you're generally interested in the topic, you could check out #AI4LAM @AI4LAM
blogs.bl.ukDigital scholarship blogThe Digital Scholarship Department works to enable innovative research based on the British Library digital collections. The blog is updated by the Library’s Digital Curators with contributions from colleagues across the Library and special guests. Follow us to learn about our upcoming events, Open Data initiatives, projects, collaborations and experiments.
Compar:IA comparator, a free tool by the digital service of the French Ministry of Culture to:
Raise citizens' awareness of generative AI and its issues
Ensure respect for the diversity of Francophone cultures in conversational AI models
Contribute to the transparency of generative AI models
https://comparia.beta.gouv.fr/
HT @figoblog #AI #ML #AI4LAM
comparia.beta.gouv.frCompar:IA
A great example of learning on the job from Asa - 'Making cursive comfortable: Transcribing 19th Century archives using AI models' https://prov.vic.gov.au/about-us/our-blog/making-cursive-comfortable as presented at #FF2024 #AI4LAM
prov.vic.gov.auMaking cursive comfortable | PROVUsing Transkribus With over 100 shelf kilometres of historic Victorian government archives, to both digitise and transcribe, from eye-bending cursive to readable text, Public Record Office Victoria has relied on volunteers to diligently perform these tasks so family and history research can be made possible online. While typeface has been relatively easy to transcribe by automation tools (e.g. Trove) handwriting has been more difficult to auto-transcribe with any accuracy.
As if prompted by #FF2024, RNZ ran this article featuring Peter Lucas-Jones and the great 92% accuracy Te Reo Māori text-to-speech work at Te Hiku Media.
"It is important to recognise that big tech is not going to save te reo Māori."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/alert-nat/531303/why-google-maps-can-t-pronounce-maori-place-names
RNZ · Why Google Maps can't pronounce Māori place names
Memory is never filed away and reopened, like a file on a hard drive. It has to be re-inscribed through action and practice. The infrastructure of memory supports this: it consists of the stories we share, but also feelings, scents, and tastes, or returning to the places where things happened.
#ff24 #archives #ai4lam #dh https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/infrastructures-of-memory
Cybernetic Forests · Infrastructures of Memory
Continued thread
But when we isolate the photograph, bird, person, or any object from the infrastructure of memory — transport into it a foreign context, or sever its relationship to the story — it loses its power, and memory can become distorted. This is a way to think about archives, and datasets, and the power of infrastructure to shape our access to memory.
Continued thread
This and other reflections on the Fantastic Futures Conference this week at the NSFA in Canberra:
#ff24 #archives #ai4lam #dh https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/infrastructures-of-memory
Cybernetic Forests · Infrastructures of Memory