Keynote: Data-Intensive Approaches to Digitized Museum Collections

Rebecca Dikow (Data Science Lab, Smithsonian Institution)
The Yale-Smithsonian Partnership presents: Machine Vision for Cultural Heritage & Natural Science Collections

The mass digitization of visual collections, on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of images, creates new challenges for curators and researchers alike. Simultaneously, the rapid pace of industry innovation in deep learning (from guiding self-driving cars to captioning smartphone images) demands the attention of library, museum, and academic professionals. Existing practices of cataloging and description can be augmented by recent advancements in machine vision – and human expertise can likewise guide the development of future algorithms for the humanities and sciences alike. This event, held at the Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, brings together scholars and curators from both institutions for conversations, demonstrations, and future partnerships.