Pre-call for Applications – German Association for Australian Studies

“From the outset, I knew this was more than an Olympic story”

Mengke Zhang’s doctoral research at EPFL’s College of Humanities (CDH) explores how the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics catalyzed sweeping urban and social transformations in Chongli, a once-remote mountainous region in China, shedding light on how state-driven development reshapes everyday life.

Digital Methods in the Humanities

Volume 1 of »Digital Humanities Research« offers a unique perspective on digital methods for and in the humanities.

Humanities Venture Lab

Het Humanities Venture Lab is dé plek voor ondernemen binnen de geesteswetenschappen

Projectmanager Humanities Cluster

Projectmanager Humanities Cluster

Governance by output reduces humanities scholarship to monologue

Drawing on a large-scale comparative study of scholars in the UK and Germany on how pressure to publish is experienced across research careers, Marcel Knöchelmann, argues that the structural incent…

Critical-Reflective Human-AI Collaboration: Exploring Computational Tools for Art Historical Image Retrieval

Just as other disciplines, the humanities explore how computational research approaches and tools can meaningfully contribute to scholarly knowledge production. We approach the design of computational tools through the analytical lens of 'human-AI collaboration.' However, there is no generalizable concept of what constitutes 'meaningful' human-AI collaboration. In terms of genuinely human competencies, we consider criticality and reflection as guiding principles of scholarly knowledge production. Although (designing for) reflection is a recurring topic in CSCW and HCI discourses, it has not been centered in work on human-AI collaboration. We posit that integrating both concepts is a viable approach to supporting 'meaningful' human-AI collaboration in the humanities. Our research, thus, is guided by the question of how critical reflection can be enabled in human-AI collaboration. We address this question with a use case that centers on computer vision (CV) tools for art historical image retrieval. Specifically, we conducted a qualitative interview study with art historians and extended the interviews with a think-aloud software exploration. We observed and recorded our participants' interaction with a ready-to-use CV tool in a possible research scenario. We found that critical reflection, indeed, constitutes a core prerequisite for 'meaningful' human-AI collaboration in humanities research contexts. However, we observed that critical reflection was not fully realized during interaction with the CV tool. We interpret this divergence as supporting our hypothesis that computational tools need to be intentionally designed in such a way that they actively scaffold and support critical reflection during interaction. Based on our findings, we suggest four empirically grounded design implications for 'critical-reflective human-AI collaboration'.