The #dhnord colloquium brings together the digital humanities community every year at the Maison Européenne des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société - MESHS in Lille. The theme chosen for 2020 considers computational approaches to images in the history and theory of the arts. This conference will bring together for the first time in France the leading specialists in artificial intelligence applied to the arts. The history of arts and culture, as well as aesthetics, have greatly benefited in recent years from the results of heritage digitization campaigns. Since 2013, digital art history has experienced unprecedented growth, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon spheres and in Europe (Joyeux-Prunel, Drucker 2013, Zorich 2012). While the analysis of texts has long been favored by the digital humanities, it is now becoming possible to carry out computational analyses on the very matter of images, or even on 3D objects, which constitutes a major turning point. This colloquium will explore how computational methods are renewing traditional questions of art history, aesthetics and visual culture (creative process, style, form, attribution, iconology, circulation of works, etc.) and raising new research questions for our disciplines (visual arts, architecture, theatre, cinema, photography, etc.) at a time when new tools are becoming available to researchers.
Papers will address the following topics: uses of artificial intelligence (especially deep learning and machine learning) applied to image corpora, data construction, and processing issues, epistemological questions related to the selection of training corpora and the use of tools, historical evolution of the field, renewal of research questions, availability of corpora, reproducibility of research and sharing of models. The invitation to foreign speakers and the need to exchange our work in an international context implies that the language used for oral communications will be English.
Due to the sanitary crisis provoked by COVID-19, DHnord2020 will take place online, with asynchronous and videoconference components. Recordings of our participants will be annotated with MemoRekall, which alongside annotations of already existing conferences, will constitute a videography that will become a reference for the study of computational approaches to art history. This videography will remain online well past November 2020, and thus, DHnord2020 will not be as ephemeral as other conferences.
Additionally, during the original dates of the conference; November 18-20, we will hold round tables discussing the papers and the impact of these new methods in the field of art history more generally.
There will also be poster presentations, and a call for proposals will soon be available.
Finally, a collective book resulting from the conference will be published by the Presses Universitaires du Septentrion and will be available in Open Access. We encourage authors to publish the datasets and the computer code jointly.
URI/Permalink: https://www.meshs.fr/page/dhnord2020en
