Reimagining Annotation for Multimodal Cultural Heritage

7-9 Feb 2024 Rennes (France)

FR EN

Call for Papers

Rapid advances in digital technology are constantly expanding the ways in which we can annotate multimodal documents, be they texts, images, videos, sounds, web pages or code. Cultural heritage institutions have embarked on ambitious campaigns to digitize their collections; at the same time, born digital heritage joins archival collections. The valorisation of digital heritage, especially audiovisual documents and multimodal corpora, is becoming a major issue for both cultural institutions and researchers. One of the answers consists of creating annotation interfaces or automating annotation thanks to computational techniques, both for close and / or distant viewing analysis.

Reimagining annotation for multimodal cultural heritage makes for an exciting and stimulating landscape, but also engenders a host of epistemological questions. How can we engage with and organize the informational hierarchies that emerge from these methods? What are the affordances and limits of close and distant reading methods and how can we articulate these two approaches? Faced with a multiplication of approaches and interfaces, how can we consolidate research and resources to encourage cumulative, collaborative work to occur? What becomes of the document’s ontology — notably in the context of time-based media and the analysis of creative processes — when it integrates a network of annotations, readings and decompositions?

This conference seeks to interrogate these questions across three primary axes:

Axis 1: Tools. We wish to interrogate the tools available for the annotation of multimodal data and cultural heritage. What is the state of the art, what tools are available to researchers? What are the issues developers face when dealing with multimodal data and especially audiovisual data? How do developers overcome the friction between powerful computational methods and users?
Axis 2: Methods. We wish to interrogate the methodologies for engaging with multimodal data and cultural heritage. How has annotation in the digital humanities developed with the emergence of computational techniques? What are the new approaches they allow for? How will the field develop from an epistemological point of view?
Axis 3: Projects. We wish to shine a light on projects that have interrogated these first two axes in academia and the GLAM sector.

We encourage researchers and cultural professionals from a large number of fields who work along these axes to contribute: the digital humanities and GLAM professionals, the performing arts, theater, cinema, music, visual art, history, video games, conservation and archival professionals, as well as cultural heritage institutions.

Indicative Bibliography

Arnold, Taylor, Stefania Scagliola, Lauren Tilton, and Jasmijn Van Gorp. “Introduction: Special Issue on AudioVisual Data in DH.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 015, no. 1 (March 5, 2021).
Arnold, Taylor, and Lauren Tilton. “Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual Corpora.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34, no. Supplement_1 (December 1, 2019): i3–16. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz013.
Bachimont, Bruno. Patrimoine et numérique: technique et politique de la mémoire. Médias et humanités. Bry-sur-Marne: INA, 2017.
Bardiot, Clarisse. Performing Arts and Digital Humanities. From Traces to Data. Wiley-ISTE, 2021. https://hal.univ-rennes2.fr/hal-03884691.
Bellia, Angela. “Towards a New Approach in the Study of Intangible Cultural Heritage,” 2019. link ..
deLahunta, Scott, K. Vincs, and Sarah Whatley. “On An/Notations.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 20, no. 6 (2015): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2015.1111036.
Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 005, no. 1 (March 10, 2011).
Duranti, Luciana, Corinne Rogers, Julie Mcleod, Elizabeth Shepherd, Fiorella Foscarini, Basma Shabou, Patricia Franks, et al. “Trusting Records and Data in the Cloud: The Creation, Management, and Preservation of Trustworthy Digital Content,” September 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.29085/9781783304042.
Jeanneret, Yves. The Trace Factory. 1st edition. Wiley-ISTE, 2020.
Manovich, Lev. “Data Science and Digital Art History.” International Journal for Digital Art History, No. 1, 2015, Pp. 12-35, June 1, 2015. https://www.academia.edu/13630995/Data_Science_and_Digital_Art_History.
Mee, Erin B. “Born-Digital Scholarship.” TDR: The Drama Review 62, no. 3 (2018): 8–9.
Rinehart, Richard, and Jon Ippolito. Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7975.001.0001.
Smits, Thomas, and Melvin Wevers. “A Multimodal Turn in Digital Humanities. Using Contrastive Machine Learning Models to Explore, Enrich, and Analyze Digital Visual Historical Collections.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, March 15, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqad008.

Scientific Committee

Anne Réach-Ngô (Université de Haute-Alsace)
Bruno Bachimont (Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France)
Clarisse Bardiot (Université Rennes 2, France)
David Rittershaus (Hochschule Mainz: University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
Emmanuel Château-Dutier (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Jacob Hart (Université Rennes 2, France)
James Smithies (King's College London, UK)
Lauren Tilton (University of Richmond, USA)
Lise Jaillant (Loughborough University, UK)
Marie-Claude Poulin (University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria)
Marta Boni (Universtié de Montréal, Canada)
Marta Severo (Université Paris Nanterre, France)
Michael Sinatra (Université de Montréal, CRIHN, Canada)
Nicolas Thély (Université Rennes 2, MSHB, France)
Olivier Baude (Huma-Num, France)
Régis Robineau (Biblissima+, France)
Valérie Schafer (Université de Luxembourg, C2DH, Luxembourg)

Online user: 2

Privacy