Tag Archives: Cultural preservation

Artificial intelligence and its possible role in preserving cultural knowledge

Despite the incidents produced by Microsoft’s out-of-control experimental chatbot “Tay” which was caused by abusive manipulation from the internet community – the bot processed into its routines the information received by other Twitter users and formulated based on these its own, politically quite incorrect tweets1 – one should nevertheless consider the promising potential offered by this technology: an artificial intelligence which can learn by selected information and improve continously the complexity and quality of its output would be able to serve as a communicator and keeper of cultural knowledge.  Continue reading Artificial intelligence and its possible role in preserving cultural knowledge

  1. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/tay-the-neo-nazi-millennial-chatbot-gets-autopsied/ []

Why we should digitize historical newspapers – theses on their importance for minority heritage

In the following I am discussing some theses on historical newspaper digitization which appeared during my projects on periodicals from German-language minorities at the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies:

I. Newspapers contain very diverse information, hence being an excellent source for various scientific disciplines and historical education. Being originally addressed to the public they offer information which was deemed relevant for a considerable part of a community or an entire society. Newspapers therefore provide a cross section through the knowledge which circulated in a certain time period and region. Because these do not demand an overly substantial historical knowledge and are chronologically structured, newspapers are excellent materials for student research projects. Beside documenting the history of knowledge and information delivery, reading newspapers is also an efficient training for information competence. However the scans need to be processed with performant OCR in order to enable an easier access to the huge amount of text. Continue reading Why we should digitize historical newspapers – theses on their importance for minority heritage