From 19 – 23 October 2023, Katrin Glinka was invited by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) as a visiting lecturer. She gave a talk that communicated our current research on »Critical-Reflective Human-AI Collaboration« to art historians working at the GRI as well as international visiting scholars.

Katrin situated our research with a theoretically informed historical perspective on museum documentation, knowledge representation, and sociotechnical systems used in cultural institutions and museums. This perspective is informed by her dissertation, with which she bridges a theoretically informed analysis with the design of sociotechnical systems. In her talk at the GRI, Katrin particularly illustrated that there is a prevailing tension between the claim to completeness, continuity of documentation, standardization, and normative knowledge orders on the one hand and the acknowledgment of pluralities of knowledge(s) that coincide with the questioning of »underlying orders« on the other. 

Finally, she addressed the question of whether and under what conditions the use of digital technologies and algorithmic processes in the context of museum collecting can amplify or trigger »transformative effects«. For this, she referenced work from critical museology, HCI, reflective and critical design, and visualization research that shows in what way socio-technical systems can be designed and conceived so that they allow museum professionals and the public to make visible or stimulate pluralized forms of knowledge and cognition in concrete usage scenarios.

Her talk advocated for a human-centered perspective that is eminent in the work conducted at the HCC Research Group. Applied to our current work on »Critical-Reflective Human-AI Collaboration, this entails that striving for epistemic pluralization can inform the design and development of socio-technical systems and algorithmic processes at the application level. 

In addition to her lecture, Katrin met with a range of researchers at the GRI to discuss data-based work in the humanities and art history. These perspectives are valuable in that they help us to inform future interdisciplinary research endeavors and motivate further activities at the HCC Data Lab.