Reimagining the Digital Humanities with AI

Reimagining the Digital Humanities with AI
By Graham West, PhD.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science
School of Applied Computational Sciences
Meharry Medical College

With the widespread proliferation of AI, many fields are rapidly evolving to incorporate these tools into their workflow. One of these fields is the digital humanities, a hybrid discipline which sits at the intersection of the humanities and computer science. Unfortunately, many of the tools created by researchers in this hybrid domain are inaccessible to the majority of pure humanities scholars who are almost always non-experts in AI. Consequently, these tools which could drastically improve their productivity and research throughput go unutilized, sitting idly in a sea of GitHub repositories. With these issues in mind, this talk will share my team's vision for an AI-assisted future for the digital humanities, with an emphasis on ancient Greek papyrology. I will present several models and pipelines that have been developed to solve tasks such as handwritten text recognition (HTR), paleographic dating, and synthetic character image generation. I will also discuss our current research efforts in higher-resolution dating and automated HTR transcription cleanup with NLP. Looking ahead, our goal is to create an accessible AI toolkit tailored for humanists, providing them with intuitive applications that will enhance their efficiency.

As always free food and drinks. Come at 6PM to socialize and 6:30pm is the presentation.

Sponsored by Nashville Software School