[Digital_humanities] Fwd: AEOLIAN Network Open Access Case Study

[Borovsky, Zoe]

A very interesting case study.
—zoe
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From: The Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums' GLAM Labs community list <GLAMLABS at JISCMAIL.AC.UK> on behalf of Katherine Aske <k.l.aske at LBORO.AC.UK>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2021 1:46 AM
To: GLAMLABS at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: AEOLIAN Network Open Access Case Study

Dear list members,

***apologies for cross posting***

I am delighted to share the news that the AEOLIAN Network’s first open-access Case Study on The National Archives UK is now available to read or download on our website: https://www.aeolian-network.net/case-studies.

With this first case study on The National Archives UK (TNA), we have two main objectives. Our first objective is to raise greater awareness of current work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to archives and to encourage further collaborations with other institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. TNA’s projects have been developed in response to key challenges brought about by born-digital and digitised records. They range from testing existing AI-powered tools, to developing new approaches, such as using topic modelling to discover the latent or underlying topics of texts across a corpus. We examine a selection of TNA’s AI projects and others from across the globe that are addressing similar challenges. Our second objective is to bring a critical perspective, from the viewpoint of Digital Humanities and Computer Science. Case Study 1 is written by a team composed of two digital humanists (Lise Jaillant and Katherine Aske) and one computer scientist (Annalina Caputo). Drawing on this cross-disciplinary expertise, we reviewed TNA’s projects and when appropriate, drew comparison with other projects conducted by other cultural institutions.
Including interviews with TNA staff as well as published materials such as reports, conference presentations and research papers, this case study is organised into three sections:

1) “Rethinking the Record” examines the transition from print to digital, which has led to an explosion of born-digital and digitised records in central government departments. Established processes to deal with paper records were disrupted, leading to a need for new methods to appraise, select and screen digital records before transfer to TNA. In this section, we will focus particularly on AI for digital selection, for sensitivity review, and for discovery of relevant records.

2) “Openness, Access and Use” starts with the need to strike a balance between risk and access, before turning to the development of tools to make collections more accessible, and finally the need to prevent harmful use of collections through risk management.

3) “Risk, Uncertainty and Trust” looks at blockchain to establish the authenticity of records; at the need to balance risk and access; and at explainable AI to build trust.

The conclusion focuses on ethical uses of AI in the context of large archival collections, at TNA and elsewhere.

The AEOLIAN Network will create a total of five case studies from UK and US institutions over the course of the project. These case studies will address the use of AI in cultural heritage organisations and will all be available online with an aim to spread awareness and collaboration throughout the GLAM sector and beyond. These case studies will feed into an open-access, 100-page report for an interdisciplinary audience outlining avenues for future research.

If you would like to join the AEOLIAN Network’s jiscmail for updates on the project, upcoming workshops, and our outputs, please visit: https://www.aeolian-network.net/join-aeolian-2/

Thank you and best wishes,

Katherine Aske
Research Assistant, AEOLIAN Project
Loughborough University

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