ONGOING PROJECTS / GRANTS:
- Project: Natural Language Processing for Digital Art History (2020-)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Recognition of the potential of computational tools and approaches for the study of cultural heritage has been growing in the last decades in different academic disciplines, including art history. Advancing digitization of artefacts and growing digital databases as well as the emergence of Open Access principles facilitate and boost these developments worldwide. However, scholars emphasize that digital research on visual arts must be informed by professional art historical knowledge that recognizes the situatedness of knowledge production (Bentkowska-Kafel, 2015). Paul Jascot (Jaskot, 2019) poses the question: “what are the critical questions in art history that demand and are best suited to specific digital methods?” Taking this position as a conceptual point of departure for our research, the project combines (i) ‘distant viewing’ (Arnold and Tilton, 2019), macroanalysing visual materials through data science and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and (ii) ‘close reading’ of the artefacts through formal and contextual analysis (Gold and Klein, 2019) to study Japanese early modern woodblock prints, so-called ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’), produced between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth century.
The project is embedded in Machine Learning for Digital Art History, an interdisciplinary and international network established in 2018 by three scholars: Prof. Ewa Machotka (History of Art), Prof. Panagiotis Papapetrou (Machine Learning), and Prof. John Pavlopoulos (Machine Learning, NLP). The network comprised Konstantina Liagkiou (Data Science, NLP) and Marita Chatzipanagiotou (Digital Humanities, NLP).
PROJECT MEMBERS:
- Ewa Machotka, Professor in East Asian Art History, University of Zurich (ewa.machotka@khist.uzh.ch)
- John Pavlopoulos, Assistant Professor (elected) in Machine Learning in information retrieval and data mining for large document collections, Dept. of Informatics of Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece (annis@aueb.gr)
- Panagiotis Papapetrou, Professor in Data Science, Stockholm University (panagiotis@dsv.su.se) • Konstantina Liagkou, Research Assistant (Data Science), Athens University of Economics and Business (konstantinalia4@gmail.com)
- Marita Chatzipanagiotou, Research Assistant (NLP), Athens University of Economics and Business (member until 2021)
All members of the project are also affiliated at the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.
PROJECT FUNDING:
- International Joint Research with Research Fund 2023, International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
- Strategic Funding 2022, Board of Human Sciences, Stockholm University
PUBLICATIONS (all authors contributed equally to all papers):
PROJECT ACTIVITIES:
Conference presentations:
# Peer-reviewed (PR), invited talks (IT), organizer (OR)
- Liagkou K., Pavlopoulos J., Machotka E.”Leveraging the Spatiotemporal Analysis of Meisho-e Landscapes”, 26th International Conference on Discovery Science, October 2023, Porto (PR).
- Machotka E., Pavlopoulos J., Liagkou, K. “AI-powered Text Recognition of Inscriptions on Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints”, August 2023, The International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Ritsumeikan University (IT).
- Machotka E., Pavlopoulos J. “Mapping meisho: NLP for Japanese Art History”, International Conference “The Digital Turn in Early Modern Japanese Studies”, December 2022, University of Cambridge (IT).
- Machotka E., Liagkou, K. “Mapping Japanese Landscape Prints with NLP: Challenges and Solutions”, International Workshop “Error Correcting HTR for Historical Manuscripts”, November 2022, Ca’Foscari University of Venice (OR).
- Pavlopoulos J. "HTR Error Correction: An Overview of the Recent HTREC Challenge", International Workshop “Error Correcting HTR for Historical Manuscripts”, November 2022, Ca’Foscari University of Venice (OR).
- Pavlopoulos J., Lagkiou K., Machotka E. “Distant Viewing of Ukiyo-e Prints.” The 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), June 2022, Marseilles (PR).
- Machotka E., Pavlopoulos J., Chatzipanagiotou M., Lagkiou K. “Improving Named-Entity Recognition on titles of Ukiyo-e prints: Towards a ‘Distant Viewing’ in Art History”, Digital Humanities Conference 2022 (ADHO) Responding to Asian Diversity, July 2022, Tokyo (PR).
- Machotka E., Pavlopoulos J. “Automated Harvesting of Geospatial Data from Ukiyo-e Prints with NLP.”, Annual Report Meeting, The International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture, February 2022, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.
- Machotka E., Pavlopoulos J., Chatzipanagiotou M. “Automated Recognition of Geographical Named Entities in Titles of Ukiyo-e prints.” Digital Humanities Workshop (DHW 2021), December 2021, Kiev (PR).
Organization of international conferences/workshops:
- International Workshop Error Correcting HTR for Historical Manuscripts, 2022, Ca’Foscari University of Venice. Machotka E., Pavlopoulos J. Role: organization and chairing.
- International Conference Digital Humanities Now, Stockholm University (2022). Machotka E., Dahlgren A., Klevnäs A., Role: co-organization and chairing.
- International Workshop Data Science for Digital Art History, at the KDD 2018 Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, London, 2018 (PR). Machotka E. and Papapetrou P. Role: organization and chairing.
Related activities:
- 2023 ARC-iJAC Project Spotlights: An Interview on Natural Language Processing for a Geospatial Exploration of Ukiyo-e Prints & AI-powered Text Recognition of Inscriptions in Ukiyo-e Prints (Project Leader: Ewa Machotka)
- Ewa Machotka acted as Co-Director of the Doctoral School in Digital Humanities, Stockholm Univerity (2020-2022) together with Anna Dahlgren and Alison Klevnäs.
