[Air-L] Four PhD Positions in AI, Digital Humanities, and Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam

[Tobias Blanke]

Apologies for cross-posting.

We have four new fully-funded PhD positions in AI, Digital Humanities, and Cultural Heritage at the University of Amsterdam. Check out the details at: https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Four-PhD-Positions-in-AI%2C-Digital-Humanities%2C-and-Cultural-Heritage/792167502/.

Project 1: LLMs for Cultural Heritage Access
Your focus will be on large language models for information access. How can we search specific collections, including full text, metadata, and multimodal content? How can we support complex search tasks and practices, such as scholarly research on cultural data, and the research and workflow of investigative journalism?
Supervisors: Jaap Kamps (ILLC)

Project 2: XAI from Artificial Intelligence to Digital Humanities
Your focus will be on applying AI explainability (XAI) in digital humanities and examine its value for the analysis of cultural-historical collections. How can we aggregate evidence in order to explain AI decisions but also how do AI models use evidence and uncertainty? How do we need to modify current XAI to meet the needs of humanities research?
Supervisors: Tobias Blanke (ILLC), Jaap Kamps (ILLC)

Project 3: XAI from Digital Humanities to Artificial Intelligence
Project 3 is complementary to project 2 but focuses on XAI from a historical-cultural perspective to analyse changes to humanities practices and epistemologies. How can we aggregate evidence to explain (past) human decisions and what are the limitations of current XAI techniques to do so? What are the cultural and theoretical conditions of XAI to explain historical materials?
Supervisors: Tobias Blanke (ILLC), Julia Noordegraaf (AHM)

Project 4: Constructing Polyvocal Cultural Heritage Narratives
Your focus will be on “polyvocality,” the current movement towards the inclusion of multiple perspectives in and on cultural heritage collections. Can we obtain reliable data to capture perspectives of different stakeholders and the relationships between them? What theoretical framework do we use to define perspectives and their relations with the underlying data sources (i.e., who created the data: experts? citizens? AI?). What perspectives are missing?
Supervisors: Julia Noordegraaf (AHM), Tobias Blanke (ILLC)

These four PhD students will be part of the digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Heritage (HAICu) project, a large national science agenda project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.