Technological Revolutions and Art History, Part Four: Lightning Rounds I

Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Heritage Collections

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Robert Kastler: Director Imaging & Visual Resources, Museum of Modern Art

Convolution as Symbolic Form: Bias in AI and how Art History Can Help
Leonardo Impett: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Durham University

From Digitization to Automated Condition Surveys
Damon Crockett: Principal Data Scientist, Yale University

WIMSy: Toward AI and Machine Vision Approaches to Watermark Analysis
Paul Messier: Chair, Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, Pritzker Director, IPCH Lens
Media Lab, Yale University

AI and the Photoarchive
X.Y. Han: Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Operations Research and Information Engineering,
Cornell University
Vardan Papyan: Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
John McQuaid: Photoarchive Lead, Frick Art Reference Library

Visual Similarity and Artwork Identifiers for the Semantic Web
Lukas Klic: Head of Digital Humanities Research, I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian
Renaissance Studies

From Image to Text: A Quick Tour of OCR
Sofia Ares Oliveira: Machine Learning Research Engineer

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Historically, science and the humanities were not considered two discrete disciplines: the separation of these two branches of knowledge developed only in the modern era. For art historians in the twenty-first century, this divide is only widening as some scholars embrace technological advances while others remain unconvinced that computational techniques and tools can bring meaningful changes to the field. Like the previous symposium “Searching Through Seeing: Optimizing Computer Vision Technology for the Arts” hosted by the Library in 2018, this four-part event seeks to encourage art historians to connect with the computer sciences by exploring the role that technology has played in the development of the discipline of art history and providing an opportunity for conversation and the exchange of ideas.

Presentations in Part IV of the symposium will highlight recent computational art history projects and other initiatives that expand the access to and discoverability of the digitized collections of a variety of cultural heritage sites and institutions.