Many researchers and organisations hold valuable archival material, such as manuscripts, images, audio recordings, or video collections, that remain underutilised because they lack digitisation, transcription, or searchable metadata.

Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence offer new opportunities to make these materials more accessible for research and to address previously intractable research questions.

This interdisciplinary workshop brings together:

• Archive and data owners with collections that are difficult to analyse or search
• AI and computational researchers with expertise in methods such as natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal machine learning
• Researchers and problem owners with research questions that could be explored using archival materials or computational approaches

The session will include short presentations, interactive discussions, and structured collaboration sessions designed to connect datasets, research questions, and technical expertise.

This workshop is in partnership with the Digital Scholarship Hub and Vision and Language Cluster at the Centre for Intelligent Sustainable Computing at Queen’s University Belfast. 

Who should attend:
This workshop will be particularly relevant for archivists, librarians, digital humanities researchers, heritage organisations, data curators, and AI researchers interested in applying computational methods to archival and cultural collections.

Attendees are encouraged to bring the below to help shape the discussion:

• an archive, dataset, or collection
• a research question or challenge
• or expertise in AI or computational methods

A small number of participants may also be invited to give short lightning pitches introducing an archive, dataset, or research question to stimulate discussion.

For questions about computational approaches, datasets, or participation, please contact Sneha Jha (s.jha@qub.ac.uk).

Refreshments: Tea, coffee, and a light lunch will be provided on arrival between 11.45am - 12.30pm.
Please indicate any dietary requirements when registering.