Recent Projects
DH@lboro Recent Project Descriptions
Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH)
UK Principle Investigator: Prof. Hilary Robinson
Loughborough University and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, are working together to record, curate, and archive 50 years’ worth of oral histories and digitised records of feminist artists in Ireland and the UK. The grant is awarded to Feminist Art Making Histories by AHRC/Irish Research Council: UK-Ireland under the Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Scheme.
Titled ‘Feminist Art Making Histories’ (FAMH), the ambitious digital humanities project aims to unearth 'hidden' and 'untold' stories of feminist art across both islands from the 1970s to the present day, so the transformative and radical advances of this generation are never forgotten.FAMH will last August 2021-July 2024, is supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council*, and will be led by UK PI Professor Hilary Robinson, of Loughborough’s School of Social Sciences and Humanities, and Irish PI Dr Tina Kinsella, from the Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Dun Laoghaire. The team is completed by co-investigators Dr Elspeth Mitchell (University of Leeds) and Dr Amy Tobin (University of Cambridge), and two research associates: Dr Martina Mullaney at IADT, and Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz at Loughborough. The project is supported by project partner the New Hall Collection of Women's Art, Cambridge, and archive host, the Digital Repository of Ireland.
The stories and accompanying memorabilia collected by FAMH – such as leaflets, tickets, and other written items – will be captured digitally and then uploaded to the Digital Repository of Ireland. In addition to curating the digital archive, FAMH will develop appropriate methods to collate and present such a resource and share their methods at the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cambridge, to benefit artists, historians, curators, museologists, teachers, and digital resource developers.
EyCon (Early Conflict Photography 1890-1918 and Visual Artificial Intelligence)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr Lise Jaillant
The Early Conflict Photography 1890-1918 and Visual AI (EyCon) project aims at harnessing AI-reliant tools to analyse a large corpus of photographs. EyCon’s database will include thousands of historical photographs documenting armed violence. The project is partnering with a network of archival institutions in France and in the UK. The project is co-funded by AHRC/Labex Passés dans le Présent joint grant in a partnership with a Université de Paris Idex “chaire environnée”.
Recent digitisation efforts of historical photographs by archival institutions have often been done in silo. This is an issue for researchers and archivists, but it also raises the question of public uses of history when it comes to contemporary perspectives on colonial/imperial warfare. Indeed, disconnected visual repositories reinforce deeply entrenched notions of national exceptionalism in France, Britain and in other states with a history of international interventionism and expansionism. Drawing on advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, EyCon aims at connecting, analysing and commenting on these divided repositories to increase the discoverability and usability of overlooked and scattered material on colonial, imperial and international armed conflicts up to 1918.
AEOLIAN Network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr Lise Jaillant
AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations) is funded by a joint programme between the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK (more information about the programme can be found here). Project Partners include the National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales; the Wellcome Collection; the History of Parliament Trust; Harvard’s Houghton Library; Yale’s Digital Preservation team and Music Library; Indiana University Libraries; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries; Educopia; Frick Collection (NYC).
The AEOLIAN network is designed to investigate the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play to make born-digital and digitised cultural records more accessible to users. AI and machine learning applied to data in libraries and other cultural institutions are at the centre of current debates in the US and the UK. Drawing on the booming interest in new technologies applied to digital cultural assets, AEOLIAN will make a ground-breaking contribution to this field through carefully-structured workshops, innovative research outputs, and the creation of an international network of theorists and practitioners working with born-digital and digitised archives.
AURA Network (Archives in the UK/Republic of Ireland & AI)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr Lise Jaillant
AURA is funded by a joint programme between the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK (more information about this programme here). Our Project Partners include the British Library; the National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Ireland; and the Irish Traditional Music Archive.
The AURA network is designed to unlock cultural assets that are preserved in digital archives closed to the public or difficult to access. The digital revolution has had a huge impact on archival collections: emails have largely replaced letters, government reports are now written in digital format. Yet, the vast majority of these born-digital records are inaccessible due to privacy, copyright or technical issues. By bringing together Digital Humanists, Computer Scientists and stakeholders (including policy makers), the network aims to design solutions to the problem of inaccessible records in digital archives.
#LboroAppliedAI Seminar Series
Semester 2 (2021)
We continued our series of #LboroAppliedAI online sessions for 2021. The series is organized by Dr Lise Jaillant and Dr Valerie Pinfield and sponsored by the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture.
The objective is to bring together colleagues and PGRs who are interested in Artificial Intelligence and its applications in a wide range of fields.
Our past speakers were:
Varuna da Silva (Institute for Digital Technologies, LU London) on "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Challenges and Real world Applications" (14 January 2021)
Saul Albert (Communication and Media, School of Social Sciences and Humanities) discussing "Three meeting points between AI and Conversation Analysis" (25 February 2021)
Andrew Morris and Ruth Welsh (Design School) on "Connected and autonomous vehicles" (4 March 2021)
Zhiqiang Niu (School of Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering) on "AI techniques for design of low carbon energy systems" (25 March 2021)
Dongda Zhang (University of Manchester) discussing "Exploring deductive and inductive approaches to generating chemical process knowledge through machine learning" (8 July 2021)
See here for more details.
Semester 1 (2020)
#LboroAppliedAI is an interdisciplinary initiative promoted by the Digital Humanities research group DH@Lboro, in partnership with the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (CRCC).
The seminar series included four online workshops for an interdisciplinary audience of colleagues who are interested in Applied AI. The online workshops brought together people in several Schools and Departments to discuss AI and its applications. It was a good way to see what colleagues were working on, to network and create research synergies. Each online workshop lasted one hour, and took place on Microsoft Teams.
Our past speakers were:
Prof Peter Kawalek (SBE) on "Network Effects, AI and Trillion Dollar Companies" (5 November 2020)
Dr Emily Corrigan-Kavanagh & Prof Mark Plumbley (Surrey) on " AI for Sound" (12 November 2020)
Dr Martin Sykora (SBE) discussing "Social Media and AI: Emotions, Stress and Manipulative Behaviours" (26 November 2020)
Dr Val Mitchell (SDCA) on "Designing user experiences at the intersection of AI and design" (2 December 2020)
See here for more details.
The Role of Maps in the Digital Humanities
A talk by Professor Heike Jöns (SSH) that looked at the role of maps in digital humanities (14 December 2020).