AI and Tech in cultural heritage and digital humanities

Wednesday, 6 April 2022, 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Zoom

Tech is the New Black: Communicating Heritage in Virtual Worlds
Dr Esterina Nervino
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Department of Marketing, City University of Hong Kong

Luxury brands have always leveraged history, culture, and arts to build their messaging. Over time, nostalgia for the past left space to a rhetoric of newness which includes not only products, but a whole set of new values driven by a customer-centric approach and technological advancements.

How AI Can boost (Digital) Humanities
Dr Valentino Santucci
Assistant Professor, University for Foreigners of Perugia, Italy

Digital Humanities (DHs) is a term used to denote the emerging discipline at thejunction of information technologies and humanities, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arapidly growing field of computer science that is now permeating a multitude of aspects of life. It looks quite natural the meeting between DHs and AI. In this talk, Santucci will show how AI can be applied to DHs by also presenting an AI-based natural language processing system formeasuring the complexity of Italian texts.

Augmented Reality Technologies for Cultural Heritage
Dr Kristen Li

Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University

Augmented Reality (AR) has been introduced in various fields such as medical,education, fashion, etc. AR technologies are also being successfully applied to preserve andpromote the Cultural Heritage. In this talk, Li will analyse and introduce various case studies of AR applications for Cultural Heritage developed in Italy and Hong Kong.

Wednesday, 9 March 2022, 4:00 p.m. on Zoom

The BBC and the Digital Revolution
Mr Raymond Li 
(Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Journalism, Hong Kong Baptist University)
The BBC is celebrating its 100th anniversaries this year.  Over the past decades, the BBC has been revitalising itself through continuous effort in adapting to the rapidly changing media environment, including the digital technological revolution in recent years. And yet, it is facing unprecedented challenges in the coming years.

Public Service Media and Algorithms – Different Approaches and Strategies through the Experience of Some Italian and European Radio Stations
Dr Marta Perrotta
(Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Communication and Entertainment, University of Rome “Roma Tre”, Italy)
The recent boom in the audio industry (IAB Europe 2021) has seen both public (Berry 2020; Martin 2021) and private radio broadcasters having to respond to a highly articulated competition from commercial platforms for listening to news, music, podcasts, audiobooks, and other audio services (reading press articles, bedtime stories, etc.) for free or for a fee. Comparing the choices of different public service companies in Italy and in Europe, Perrotta explores some of the – currently provisional – answers to these challenges, through the design of apps dedicated to listening to and consuming online and offline content.

Decoding the Sources of Creativity of Cultural Products: A Computational Method on International and Italian Sci-fi Movies
Dr Xinzhi Zhang
(Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism, Hong Kong Baptist University)
The emergence of Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in human society has cultural, social, and psychological impacts. Depictions and critical reflections on AI technologies are not only debated in news or commentaries but also in the fictional and imagined worlds, especially sci-fi movies. The present project examines the representation of cyborgs (human-like robots) and human-machine communication portrayed in sci-fi movies. Zhang and his team harvested movie data from an open online database, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and constructed citation networks among the movies. The team reveals the most influential movies in history. They also make a case analysis on the Italian sci-fi movies, highlighting their roles in this global movie cultural trend on the fictional construction of human-machine communication. 

Co-organized by HKBU School of Communication and Film and Academy of Visual Arts