On September 27, Rainer and Nicole were invited to present the LiviaAI-project at the Digital Art History (DArtHistAustria) Meeting held in Krems. DArtHistAustria is a society focused on bringing together all who are interested in the use of digital methods for art historical research in Austria. Its members represent the highly diverse research community located both in universities as well as museums or other institutions.
Our talk was entitled “Das Projekt Linking Viennese Art through AI - Ein Zwischenbericht” and provided an overview of the scope of the project as well as an introduction to our technical workflows.
It was a lot of fun to present the project to a group of interested and knowledgeable cultural heritage professionals, and the discussions were very useful to inform the further development of our project. Thank you to DArtHistAustria for the invite!
As a team we regularly discuss the challenges of communicating technical processes to different audiences. With a topic as complex as Artificial Intelligence, we have found that people often have a lot of preconceived ideas and that there is little consensus in the Digital Humanities community about what Artificial Intelligence is, or what it can or cannot do. Therefore, we have been including a fairly basic introduction to the technology as such, and the specific techniques that we use in LiviaAI. Our project combines methods from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, which are two fairly different areas. In LiviaAI, both approaches dovetail perfectly. However, describing our approach in simple terms, in a 15 minute talk, while still placing art historical topics at the center, is a considerable challenge.
Here is our attempt at navigating this challenge for an audience with a specific interest in digital methods.
How do you present complex technological projects to various academic audiences? How do you explain the value of your research without becoming overly technical? We would love to hear about your experiences!