The award for the Best Network Institute Academy Assistant project for this year goes to the project titled “Between Art, Data, and Meaning – How can Virtual Reality expand visitors’ perspectives on cultural objects with colonial background?” This project was carried out by VU students Isabel Franke and Stefania Conte, supervised by Thilo Hartmann and UCDS researchers Claudia Libbi and Victor de Boer. A project report and research paper is forthcoming but you can see the poster below.
It has pleased NWO to award the HAICu consortium funding under the National Research Agenda programme. In the HAICu project, AI researchers, Digital Humanities researchers, heritage professionals and engaged citizens work together on scientific breakthroughs to open, link and analyze large-scale multimodal digital heritage collections in context.
At VU, researchers from the User-Centric Data Science group will research how to create compelling narratives as a way to present multiple perspectives in multimodal data and how to provide transparency regarding the origin of data and the ways in which it was created. These questions will be addressed in collaboration with the Museum for World Cultures on how citizen-contributed descriptions can be combined with AI-generated labels into polyvocal narratives around objects related to the Dutch colonial past in Indonesia.