ChIA

ChIA – Accessing and Analysing Cultural Images with New Technologies, is a collaborative effort between the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) and Europeana Local - Österreich that aims to engage and test new technologies against the background of a selected dataset of food images for the benefit of accessing and analysing cultural data.

The ChIA project, funded by the go!digital NEXT GENERATION programme, is innovative in that it proposes to use combinations of novel computational methods (visual search, chatbot technologies) and state-of-the-art tools (semantic thesauri) that have previously not been used together for cultural image access and analysis in the digital cultural heritage collection of Europeana Local - Österreich. Cultural heritage plays a major role in both physical and digital realms. The topic of food is a fundamental part of mankind’s cultural wealth and has also a firm place in the UNESCO’s Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage.

While the project aims to improve Europeana’s data access by creating an intermediate layer architecture to integrate and apply the proposed digital tools, it also enables increased and enriched knowledge insights. Additionally, the project functions as a test-bed and playground for experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a digital cultural context, where experimental settings and knowledge design practices open perspectives to other connected disciplines and serve as examples for similar future undertakings that aim to apply and enhance digital methods within the framework of cooperation projects.

ChIA is realised within the Open Innovation Research Infrastructure (OI-RI) at exploration space, following principles of the Open Innovation Strategy for Austria, and further capitalises on knowledge by connecting with larger existing data infrastructures such as DARIAH, EGI and E-RIHS.