Mission

CultuR-AI aims to develop open-source, modular Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) workflows within the CLARIN frameworks to automate metadata enrichment, improve automatic transcription (e.g. OCR, HTR) quality, and identify potential bias in cultural heritage collections.

By leveraging interdisciplinary expertise, the project seeks to provide reusable tools that enhance the discoverability and interoperability of Belgian heritage data while supporting the transition toward automated, FAIR-compliant digital curation. The GenAI workflows developed within CultuR-AI will be open-source, modular, and designed for integration within CLARIN – Research Infrastructure for Language as Social and Cultural Data, and EOSC – the European Open Science Cloud (e.g. via APIs, containers, or reproducible pipelines).

This project will be able to take advantage of current and in-development infrastructure, research outputs and expertise at KBR and KIK-IRPA – Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, and brings together expertise on GenAI from researchers at the partner institutions of Ghent University’s Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and UCLouvain’s research lab CENTAL- Le Centre de Traitement automatique du Langage, and support from the CLARIN-Centre of the INT – Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal.  This project makes contributions to KBR’s growing research data infrastructure.

This infrastructural project is financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) as part of the ESFRI programme, project #EF/253/CultuR-AI and makes contributions to CLARIN.

The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University and CENTAL of UCLouvain are partners on this project and the CLARIN-Centre of the INT – Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal is a subcontracted partner. 

Contact

Prof. dr. Julie M. Birkholz, Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the Department of History & GhentCDH at Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, & Lead of the Digital Research Lab
whyvr.ovexubym@htrag.or