AI trends in digital humanities research

Abstract

Recent advances in specialised equipment and computational methods had a significant impact in the Humanities and, particularly, cultural heritage and archaeology research. Nowadays, digital technology applications contribute in a daily basis to the recording, preservation, research and dissemination of cultural heritage. Digitisation is the defining practice that bridges science and technology with the Humanities, either in the tangible or in the intangible forms. The digital replicas support a wide range of studies and the opening of new horizons in the Humanities research. Furthermore, advances in artificial intelligence methods and their successful application in core technical domains opened up new possibilities to support Humanities research in particularly demanding and challenging tasks. This paper focuses on the forthcoming future of intelligent applications in archaeology and cultural heritage, by reviewing recent developments ranging from deep and reinforcement learning approaches to recommendation technologies in the extended reality domain.