Schmidt Sciences has awarded $11 million for up to 23 teams of researchers around the world, including Professor David Bamman, UC Berkeley School of Information, to develop and apply artificial intelligence to archaeology, history, literature, and other humanities disciplines, seeking to unlock new understandings of human history and culture, the organization announced today.
Professor Bamman’s project, “Bridging Large-Scale Computational Analysis and the Close Viewing of Film and Television,” brings together experts in data science, computer science, film studies, and media studies to bridge the affordances of large-scale analysis with traditional humanistic scholarship, focusing on four case studies.
These studies will explore the historical development of the close-up and camera movement (dolly shots, crane shots), build models to disentangle narrative storylines in film and TV, and explore the relationship between visual and aural timing in television. Co-principal investigators are Allison Cooper (Bowdoin College) and Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton (University of Richmond). The project will result in new scholarship bridging the humanities and AI, along with open-source software for others to use.
“Our newest technologies may shed light on our oldest truths, on all that makes us human—from the origins of civilization to the peaks of philosophical thought to contemporary art and film,” said Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences. “Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) is poised to change not only the course of scholarship, but also the way we see ourselves and our role in the world.”
Humanities scholars have a hard time using AI models because those models are trained on massive amounts of contemporary data, modern languages, and two-dimensional media, whereas humanities research often involves ancient or lesser-spoken languages, three-dimensional artifacts, art made from a variety of materials, and relatively small amounts of ambiguous and culture-specific information. The Schmidt Sciences’s HAVI program will support researchers to create new AI models or evolve existing ones to open new avenues for historical understanding and inquiry.
“Rather than destroying the humanities, as many have feared, AI has a role in advancing the humanities, opening new avenues of scholarship,” said Brent Seales, a University of Kentucky professor who leads HAVI. “Computational methods have been a part of the study of humanities for decades, and it’s time to explore how to integrate AI into this essential scholarship.”
The teams were selected after multiple rounds of review by Schmidt Sciences and external experts. They join two inaugural awards from HAVI granted earlier this year—one to the Sorbonne University in Paris to study the artworks of Eugene Delacroix and a second to EduceLab, a first-of-its-kind, next-gen heritage science user facility that applies AI, micro-CT imaging, and other high-tech instrumentation to the study of cultural heritage artifacts.
