Giulia Osti

Title: Customising AI for digital curation work that utilises controlled vocabularies

Supervision Team: Amber Cushing, UCD / Suzanne Little, DCU

Description: Digital curators are the “frontline” practitioners who work to appraise, select, ingest, apply preservation actions, maintain, and then, provide access and use to digital heritage objects for all types of users, from digital humanities scholars to tourists. This work has the potential to benefit from AI technology, particularly computer vision. Ethical issues surround the use of controlled vocabulary classification systems that digital curators utilise to arrange and describe digitised historical photograph collections in heritage institutions. If these ethical concerns are not addressed uptake of AI technology in this sector may be slow or limited. The project will explore the ethical and social context of digital curation work to inform customisation of an AI model for use in the sector. The project will utilise Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to customise and refine a computer vision (CV) model for use with the Library of Congress subject heading classification system. This position is based at the UCD School of Information & Communication Studies.