1 of 7

Networks & technology

Harry Verwayen I September 25 2018

Let’s start with the good news: Europe is a world leader in digital heritage innovation. Europeana, the initiative of the EU consists of a thriving network of close to 4000 memory institutions who have shared over 50 million digitized objects in a standardized format on the Europeana Platform. This model, based on open standards and an inclusive, distributed approach, is being adopted from the US to Japan and from Brazil to Canada. 10 years ago the EU took a bold decision that our heritage is too important to leave to market forces alone. Two weeks ago the Public Evaluation of Europeana has shown that it is still very relevant to the challenges we are facing today in Europe and has recommited its support to the initiative.

However, we are facing some serious challenges and unfortunately AV archives more than any other creative medium.

2 of 7

3 of 7

Unfortunately AV is trailing behind the pack in this competition for access: in Europeana we provide access to around 1 million videos (and 700 k sound recordings) but only 6 k (half a percent) is explicitly labeled as available for reuse such as this news item from the institute of sound and vision.

So what can be done about this? How do we have impact on the big societal issues that Europe faces using a powerful agent like AV archives to our advantage?

A large part of the issue lies of course in copyright. We encourage institutions to adopt open access policies where they commit to publish collections they own copyright to under an open license.

But at this point in time more importantly: we work together with our partners to develop technology solutions that improve the access to the material that is in copyright.

4 of 7

5 of 7

Time Machine

FET flagship initiative

But we should think much further than that: what if we could make full use of the capabilities of AI and machine learning to mine these archives, at scale? We’d be able to make all kinds of connections, discover patterns and uncover the past in unprecedented ways!

Here you see the map of Venice, where a prototype version of the Time Machine project has been experimenting with deep mining the city archives to extract intelligence about that cities past. Trade routes, social mobility patterns, the way knowledge flowed through the city, over time. Mining this data brings about endless possibilities to improve education, enrich tourist experiences and give meaning to past events.

Imagine doing this at scale across Europe also mining AV archives using speech and image recognition, and partitioning of scenes. This will allow us to solve the most apparent limitations such as easy translation of subtitles and findability of relevant sections of otherwise very long and unwieldy videos.

That is exactly what the Time Machine FET flagship initiative proposes: the development of a large-scale (robotised) digitisation and computing infrastructure to extract intelligence using AI.

6 of 7