Hermeneutics versus Artificial Intelligence

29.06.2020, 06.07.2020, 13.07.2020

online under https://www.conf.dfn.de/stream/nr57r4vtep4ao (provided by DFN)

preparatory materials for some of the talks can be found here

Organisers:

Cristina Vertan, Alicia Gonzalez Martinez, Walther v. Hahn

Programme in PDF

 The digitalization campaign during the last years made available a big number of manuscripts, printed books, inscriptions, to a broad public. Most of them remain inaccessible for non-specialists for several reasons: the script cannot be deciphered, the language disappeared or its historical variants differ too much from the modern one, the semantics of the words changed or the conceptual space is completely different from ours. Computational methods and especially artificial intelligence offer powerful mechanisms to bring these rich cultural heritage assets into new light, made them transparent and more accessible for non-specialists and allow also more interdisciplinary collaboration. On the other hand, processing these documents implies often the rethinking and adaptation of established paradigms in the computer science and the embedding of principles of the ground method in humanities „hermeneutics”.

In this public lecture series, we invite internationally renowned scholars working in the cutting- edge domain of digital culture heritage to present current approaches of using computational methods on old scripts, show benefits, discuss the change of paradigm in humanistic interpretation and address also limitation of machines. The talk will address a broad spectrum of scripts and languages among them Arabic, classical Ethiopic, Coptic, Latin, classical Greek, old German.

The series of lectures is supported by the Project HerCoRe financed by the Volkswagen Foundation and the ERC Project COHBUNI