Like other industries, the cultural heritage sector is also affected by digital transformation. In national and international cultural institutions, efforts are being made to predict the impact of Artificial Intelligence on museums, libraries, historical archives, churches, monuments and archaeological sites.
Some solutions for safeguarding and cataloging cultural heritage using AI have already been implemented and activated.AI is used, for example, in archives to describe and classify works of art and automatically generate captions. Artificial intelligence techniques are also adopted to discover new archaeological areas with drone footage, as in the pilot project Cultural Landscapes Scanner; the European project RePAIR, then, uses robots to reconstruct shattered artifacts of antiquity.
AI generally improves the accessibility of digital archives by optimizing the cataloging and management of museum and documentary collections. In addition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques enable automatic transcription of ancient texts and their translation. AI-based systems analyze visual features such as brush strokes and textures to authenticate works of art and detect forgeries.
The most interesting front is undoubtedly that which concerns the use of artificial intelligence to enable new forms of accessibility and enhancement of cultural heritage: indeed, in this context it is possible to include the concept of Homo Extensus, understood as an evolution of humans in their relationship with cultural heritage, thanks to new human intellectual faculties enabled by Artificial Intelligence.
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