Workshop – Digital Humanities: Computational Analysis of Cultural Heritage Images, Uppsala University
Event: Digital Humanities Workshop: Computational Analysis of Cultural Heritage Images Date: October 2025 Host: Uppsala University Materials: github.com/laurajul/DH-Workshop
This practical workshop introduces participants to computational approaches in the digital humanities through the analysis of European cultural heritage image collections. Drawing inspiration from the concept of “distant reading,” the session explores how algorithms can be employed to “read” and interpret collections of visual and cultural data at scale.
Participants work with Europeana’s API and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) to access standardized cultural heritage data from across Europe, engaging directly with dataset metadata and image embeddings generated via CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining) to categorize, cluster, and experiment with various forms of computational sorting and analysis.
The workshop combines conceptual discussion with hands-on exercises, covering:
- How APIs provide programmatic access to cultural heritage collections
- How IIIF standardizes access to cultural heritage images across institutions
- How machine learning models operationalize notions of similarity, categorization, and meaning in visual data
- How to work with cross-institutional datasets spanning European collections
By reflecting on both the affordances and limitations of such algorithmic readings, the session aims to foster a critical understanding of how computational methods can augment and challenge traditional art-historical and cultural-analytical practices.