WP6: AI for cultural heritage

This work package investigates how AI can help discover, organise, and showcase the richness of cultural heritage collections. We develop intelligent tools for curating vast archives—with a particular focus on music and minority cultural expressions—while ensuring ethical, inclusive, and responsible use of AI in the cultural heritage sector.

Description

Archives, libraries, and museums (the “ABM sector” in Norway) are central institutions for preserving, sharing, and communicating human culture. The National Library of Norway is distinguished by its extensive collection of high-quality digital resources and the advanced Digital Humanities Lab. It is essential to integrate all these resources and numerous local collections in Norway into a cohesive digital framework and further connect them to the European Cultural Heritage Cloud.

This necessitates automated, intelligent curation of the vast collections. One focus will be on music, leveraging the cutting-edge computational musicology research at UiO in collaboration with the National Library. We will pioneer hybrid AI models by blending machine learning with musicology and cognition-based symbolic AI.

Particular attention will be dedicated to minority cultural expressions, including Norwegian folk music, Sámi joik and world chant cultures. We aim to create models for creating, curating, and analysing comprehensive catalogues transferable to other contexts and cultural heritage areas.

The public sector must lead in these technologies, ensuring that powerful new capabilities are used ethically and inclusively. This approach seeks to empower institutions, artists, and the public to leverage archives, exploring the influence of past cultural expressions on contemporary creativity while promoting respectful citation and avoiding plagiarism.

Research Questions

RQ6.1: How can we significantly advance AI to effectively discover, organise, and showcase the vast richness of cultural heritage and creative works in all forms?
RQ6.2: How can AI technologies be used ethically and inclusively to protect and nurture minority cultural expressions while considering AI’s broader impact on cultural practices?
RQ6.3: How can we advance AI research to enable national institutions to effectively guard against the risks of unchecked and exploitative AI use in cultural heritage?
RQ6.4: How can we develop interlinking systems within cultural heritage and creative works to enhance rights management and highlight their profound impact on contemporary creativity?

Approaches

CREATE: innovative AI technologies to automatically transcribe, analyse, classify, interconnect, and showcase vast, unstructured multimedia datasets, highlighting the richness of creative works.
EXPLORE: the effectiveness of current and custom AI systems in preserving and nurturing Norwegian cultural expressions, focusing on minority cultures.
REFLECT: on the ethical and legal threats of AI usage in cultural heritage and develop policies and guidelines to ensure responsive, ethical and inclusive use of AI.