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Devika Mehra (Loughborough University) writes about her work on the EyCon project

I joined the EyCon (Visual AI and Early Conflict Photography) project as a postdoctoral research associate in January 2023. The project’s emphasis on using Artificial Intelligence to shed light on colonial history and the ethics of making sensitive archival records accessible to the public sparked my interest. Up until that point, my study focused on expanding access to children’s literature archives although with limited use of AI. I am curious about how larger audiences might interact with the history of children’s books and archive collections, which are generally studied by children’s literature scholars and archivists who have prior knowledge of these holdings and the required permissions to access them. I was keen to learn how AI could improve accessibility to diverse archival collections.

The fact that EyCon also addresses the ethics of AI concerning cultural heritage and the accessibility of sensitive archival collections was helpful. As someone who was exploring the issue of diversity in international children’s archives (print and visual), I had the chance to work with an interdisciplinary team of colleagues that gave me an insight into different facets of AI that can interpret not easily accessible history.

EyCon brings together archivists, Digital Humanists, Computer Scientists, and other stakeholders to explore how to make archives more accessible. These accessibility issues have arisen as collections become data in the process of digitising more materials. As they can include sensitive information or be so large that they are practically hard to discover and utilise, these digitised files might be difficult to be accessed easily by the public.

EyCon intends to connect, analyse, and comment on these sources, drawing on AI to improve the discoverability and usability of neglected and dispersed information on colonial armed conflicts up to 1918. EyCon’s main goal is to evaluate how beneficial computation is for visualising, navigating, and analysing massive visual corpora. EyCon intends to harness computation, question it, and evaluate new visualisation techniques when they are used in historical research. In doing so, it responds to the moral and intellectual concerns brought up by the use of AI techniques to analyse contentious historical events.

When I first arrived in January, I helped with the copyediting of the EyCon website. I learned more about the team, the project, and the way the website was created as a result of it. Soon after, I began work on helping organise the second workshop’s planning for the EyCon project. Here, we have gathered our regular working groups to discuss the prospects for AI and archives and to devise fresh initiatives.

“Using Visual AI Applied to Digital Archives,” the second EyCon workshop, has been organised in collaboration with the Imperial War Museums (IWM) Institute, the IWM’s centre for research and knowledge hub. The workshop will take place in person from June 8 through June 9, 2023, at the IWM in London. It will offer a forum for discussing the enormous difficulties that academics, archivists, and other professionals encounter when dealing with a sizable volume of visual data, especially sensitive material. A combination of presentations on Day 1 and interactive sessions on Day 2 will make up the workshop, which will enable interaction with French and UK cultural organisations affected by the difficulties of sensitive digitised archives.

I was given the chance to work on the AEOLIAN project at about the same time. The final AEOLIAN workshop provided me with more information about the project and the potential of the AI and GLAM sectors. Exploring the effect this project had on academic and professional practitioners was made possible by working on the AEOLIAN website and posting the films. These videos have been crucial for raising awareness of the project’s work and serving as a helpful frame of reference for describing some of the most critical problems facing AI today. The AEOLIAN network’s interdisciplinary character has produced articles that are applicable to a wide range of industries and show the potential of AI and some of its possible drawbacks in ways that go well beyond archives and cultural heritage.

I continued working on two special issues, one for the AEOLIAN network and the other for the EyCon project, in addition to the workshops. I helped with the AEOLIAN special issue, ‘Applying Innovative Technologies to Digitised and Born-Digital Archives’ for JOCCH (Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage), which involved contacting authors and journal editors, inviting reviewers, and reviewing. It made me aware of how much work is being done in the areas of AI, digital archives, and cultural heritage organisations. So, keep an eye out for this special issue for the opportunity to explore the application of innovative technologies, including AI to digital and born-digital archives. DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly) will publish the EyCon special issue focusing on the theme of ’Using Visual AI Applied to Digital Archives’, which is currently being written.

Being a part of this interdisciplinary network over the past few months has been great. I am eager to see what this quickly developing field will bring us next. The discourse around archives and artificial intelligence that the AURA, AEOLIAN, EyCon, and LUSTRE projects have begun will pave the way for future innovations and collaborations. We look forward to growing the network in the future, and I am curious to find out more about how technology and history might combine to make archives more accessible.