Repenser la valorisation du patrimoine photographique à l'ère de l’intelligence artificielle

The acceleration of the rate of digitization of photographic collections by museums, libraries and archives around the world reveals every day a little more the considerable extent of this visual heritage. Faced with the growing mass of images now accessible in digital form, several questions arise: How to maintain the intelligibility, discoverability, attractiveness and relevance of ever-larger corpus, both for researchers and for the general public? Can artificial intelligence technologies help institutions meet this challenge? How can we mobilize these tools effectively, with the right partners and at reasonable costs?

These issues will be at the heart of the international symposium organized by Villa Guimet at musée Guimet as part of the HikarIA project (2023-2027), co-financed by Caisse des Dépôts (France 2030). Bringing together specialists from European institutions around these questions, the meeting will explore a wide range of uses of AI applied to photographic heritage: segmentation, automated description, indexing, pattern recognition, semantic research, search by similarity, transcription, translation, geolocation, ontology, classification, statistical analysis, etc.

The event will also pay particular attention to the multiple forms of valuation made possible by these tools, whether they are carried out by public or private actors. It will thus foster an interdisciplinary dialogue around the contemporary transformations of access, study and mediation of photographic heritage in the age of artificial intelligence.

Finally, the event will respond to another symposium on the same theme, organized in June 2027 in Kyoto with the Art Research Center of Ritsumeikan University, and which will bring together specialists based in Asia.