Arno Bosse

An Introduction to AI for Art Historians

Presentation: March 18, 2021, 12-1pm (CEST)

Workshop: March 19, 2021, 12-1pm (CEST)

By now, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have permeated many areas of our private lives and are starting to become of value to our professional interests. At the same time, their very ubiquity and apparent seamlessness can make it difficult for us to imagine how to explore AI more experimentally in research contexts. For example, the ability of an algorithm to recognize human faces and poses in a photograph certainly seems relevant to identifying iconographic motifs in a painting. But what, as art historians, can we do with this intuition? How can we evaluate for ourselves what AI might be able to offer to our field? What are the best practices in this area? What are the methodological constraints and pitfalls we need to consider? In short, where do we begin?

The goal of this session is to engage with these questions in an informal and non-technical setting. We’ll begin with a presentation of the AI landscape and relevant methods, followed by a review and discussion of representative examples of current research in the field, including methodological challenges (e.g. to what extent ‘black-box’ algorithms are open to interpretation). In a subsequent hands-on workshop we will experiment informally with ready-to-use AI tools and demos to acquaint ourselves first hand with what kinds of results are possible today. After attending both events participants should have the basic grounding and context to be able to explore this area further in collaboration with digital humanities and computer science colleagues.