Research project will shine new light on the Golden Age
A new PhD student and Postdoc will join CHC and take a new and formalised look at the Danish Golden Age using artificial intelligence.
A research team from Aarhus University will take a new and formalised look at the Danish Golden Age using artificial intelligence. The project is supported by the AUFF NOVA Foundation with 2,474,500.
“Golden Imprints of Danish Cultural Heritage. A Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Temporal Reconstructions of the Danish Golden Age”. This is the title of the project a team of researchers sets out to investigate.
Heading the project is Associate Professor Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig who alongside Kristoffer Nielbo and Center for Humanities Computing will be testing whether the standard narrative we have about the Golden Age as a formative national period also plays out as the one known to us so far.
The researchers will test this using already available digital cultural heritage materials consisting of text and images from the period 1750-1930 gathered into one big corpus. Using artificial intelligence technology the researchers will test the common description of the cultural changes of the period. This can provide us with important new insights into the essential period of time. This will be beneficial in both the short and long term, according to Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig.
“In the short therm the grant enables us to collect Danish Golden Age data in one large collection enabling us to train models for representation of the period going forward. In the long term the project will demonstrate the advantages of introducing more rigour and formalism into history science. In other words, the purpose of the project is not only to reevaluate the exploration of Denmark in the 19th century; we also want to influence study practices of any other period and any other geographical area.”
The project is supported by the AUFF NOVA Foundation whose purpose is to support projects that are pioneering in their field and show clear potential for scientific breakthroughs. The hypothesis or problem behind the project may require development of new methods and it may challenge existing paradigms.
For Center for Humanities Computing, Golden Imprints means a new PhD student and Postdoc that will continue our research in change detection and description, but compliment our current models with a multimodal representation learning for text and images for historical data.