HumAI: Beyond the Catalogue: AI Search and New Paths into Heritage Collections

About the seminar

Digitally collected and stored does not simply equate to digitally available. Mass digitization and the steady growth of born-digital material have made heritage collections larger than ever, but size alone does not make them usable. Copyright restrictions, data protection rules, outdated technical systems, and sparse description still limit how researchers can find and work with relevant material — much of it preserved but effectively forgotten. AI-based search does not remove these barriers, but it changes their shape — and has quietly become part of the humanities’ research infrastructure.
Drawing on work at KBLab at the National Library of Sweden — including multimodal image search across historical postcards and AI-generated transcription and search across radio collections — this talk examines how AI models are being used to create new entrance points into heritage collections, and what it means to make previously hard-to-find material newly visible. 
What happens when source selection is guided not only by cataloguers and metadata, but also by models trained to detect patterns and similarity? How do AI-based search systems relate to more traditional forms of description, and what kinds of blind spots or distortions do they introduce? The talk also considers how such techniques can reshape the identity of a collection itself — shifting attention away from what has already been catalogued and named, toward what has previously escaped notice. More broadly, it asks where humanities expertise is most needed: in shaping such tools, in evaluating them, or in helping scholars engage critically with their outputs.
 
Chris Haffenden is the deputy head of KBLab, the National Library of Sweden’s data lab for AI development and research using digital collections, and is affiliat­ed with the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. His research examines the history of cultural memory and authorial afterlives, with particular attention to practices of self-erasure and the genealogy of the “right to be forgotten”. He co-authored the article “Towards Erasure Studies” (Memory, Mind & Media, 2023) and has also published on Romantic-era celebrity culture, protective erasure, and AI in libraries and cultural heritage institutions.