New volume available as open accessHumanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence

28 February 2022

Photo: Gwen Melzer

The proceedings of the workshop 'Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence' (CHAI), which was part of the 44th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence from 27 September to 1 October 2021, are now available online.

Recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence do not stop at the humanities. The new technology makes new research methods possible, which in turn allow new questions to be raised. Addressing concrete cases of application, the First Workshop on Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence, which was part of the 44th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence from 27 September to 1 October 2021, attempted to explore some of the emerging possibilities. The proceedings of this workshop, edited by Sylvia Melzer, Jost Gippert, Stefan Thiemann, and Hagen Peukert, are now available as open access.

‘While the humanities remained largely unaffected by last century’s digitization, the rapid achievements in AI technology of today can now be harnessed to more profound advances of data analysis in the Humanities’, the editors write in the Introduction. ‘It is about time to ask: where are possible fields of exploration that are beneficial to research carried out in the humanities?’ Accordingly, the five contributions in the present volume ‘are not about solving AI problems but about being able to solve use cases in the field of the Humanities with the use of AI.’ In sum, the papers give a sense of why artificial intelligence, rather than being just another method that makes life easier for researchers, can be seen as ‘a generator of new insights impossible to achieve with the existing inventory of methods.'

The whole volume can be downloaded from the website of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings.