Fall 2022 — Issue 1, Volume 2
This issue of 鶹ýAV BITS the Information Theory Magazine showcases how information processing tools can be used to address challenges arising in the arts and humanities.
Column article(s)
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Information Processing Challenges at the National Archives
The National Archives, U.K., faces a number of information processing challenges relating to the volume, variety and velocity of the data it handles, as well as its need to ensure value and veracity. This feature highlights some of these challenges as well as some of the work it is undertaking to address them.
Machine Learning in the Eyes of a Painting Conservator Publisher: 鶹ýAV
As a conservator specializing in paintings, I first got in contact with machine (deep) learning in 2015, when I was working as part of a team of conservators from the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) restoring the Ghent Altarpiece (1426) by the van Eyck brothers.
Image Processing and the Analysis of Paintings—The Case of Serbian Baroque Icons
Technical studies of paintings are based on many analytical techniques that complement art historical studies. Understanding the processes that happen with the aging of the paint is very important for conservators. The paint layer cracks and lifts, the materials discolor and new layers are added over time, slowly changing the appearance of the artwork. Crack patterns in the paint layer can be used in the study of the composition of the paint layer as well as its conservation history...
Special Issue on Information Processing in the Arts and Humanities
The papers in this special issue focus on information processing in the arts and humanities. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of various sophisticated information processing tools — including some involving artificial intelligence — that are capable of interrogating increasingly complex datasets in order to tackle challenges arising in a wide range of application domains.
Forecasting Environmental Conditions to Foster Climate Resilience in Heritage
Heritage objects are continually at risk from the harmful agents of deterioration, and these risks may be exacerbated by climate change [2]. Therefore, heritage institutions need to adopt a position of climate resilience; they must “anticipate, absorb, and adapt” to the effects of climate change to preserve cultural heritage for future generations [10]. One crucial step is to understand how the future climate may affect the environments surrounding heritage objects whether they are ...
Support for AI Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has supported independent academic research involving information processing tools since its founding in 2005.
Machine learning (ML), being now widely accessible to the research community at large, has fostered a proliferation of new and striking applications of these emergent mathematical techniques across a wide range of disciplines. In this article, we will focus on a particular case study: the field of paleoanthropology, which seeks to understand the evolution of...
Ancient texts are unique evidence providing a glimpse into the thoughts, day-to-day life, and culture of people of long-gone eras. Paleography, the study of writing, aims at documenting the inscriptions, transliterating the texts, reconstructing their historical context, and studying the evolution of writing itself. The digital revolution gave rise to comput...
Textual documents, such as manuscripts and historical newspapers, make up an important part of our cultural heritage. Massive digitization projects have been conducted across the globe for a better preservation of, and for providing easier access to such, often vulnerable, documents. These digital counterparts also allow to unlock the rich information contai...
Information lattice learning (ILL) is a novel framework for knowledge discovery based on group-theoretic and information-theoretic foundations, which can rediscover the rules of music as known in the canon of music theory and also discover new rules that have remained unexamined. Such probabilistic rules are further demonstrated to be human-interpretable. IL...
An important question in cultural heritage concerns the make process of an artifact. Understanding the make process provides insight related to the origin, techniques, and craftsmanship used to make the artifact. Searching for tool marks or traces left by the artist’s hand is one way of retrieving clues related to the make process. X-ray computed tomography ...
Empirical research in science and the humanities is vulnerable to bias which, by definition, implies incorrect or misleading findings. Artificial intelligence-based analysis of visual artworks is vulnerable to bias in ways specific to the domain. Works of art belong to a distinct cultural category that often prioritizes such characteristics as hand-craftsman...
X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis of art objects has rapidly gained popularity since the late 2000s due to its increased accessibility to scientists. This introduced an imaging component whereby the XRF image volume provides clues as to which chemical elements are present and where they are located spatially in the object. However, as is the nature of collec...
In recent decades, cultural heritage research—and in particular art investigation—has been undergoing a digital revolution. This is due both to improvements in the digitization and the acquisition of artifact’s images generated using traditional 2-D imaging methods as well as the growing adoption of a range of more recently introduced spectroscopic imaging t...