Workshop 2.4 | Generative Humans: Mediating Automation & AI Through Impactful Engagement and Experience with Cultural Collections
Date: Thursday, 2 July 2026, 16:00-18:00
Location: R92
Speakers:
Andy Corrigan, University of Cambridge Libraries & Archives, United Kingdom
Jodie Double, University of Leeds Libraries, United Kingdom
Organised by the LIBER Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Working Group
‘The essential nature of the historical spirit consists not in the restoration of the past but in thoughtful meditation with contemporary life’ (Gadamer, 1989)
Having collaborated on LIBER’s DS Topic Guides, the Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Working Group (DSDCH) is reflecting further on methods of upskilling our library workforces in response to the challenges of artificial intelligence and LIBER’s 2023-2027 Strategy. The most compelling benefits of digitised collections stem from their distinction to their physical analogues – liberated from time and place (Stanford, 2020). As gatekeepers to communities of knowledge, libraries and archives are uniquely suited to facilitate this proposition in response to uncertainty. We’re accustomed to controlling access to collections and databases, so it’s no wonder their reinterpretation by generative AI and ready availability in people’s pockets makes us prone to automation anxiety. This doesn’t mean libraries and archives have less power to connect the past to the future via our present, but it could need a different approach (Bassett & Roberts, 2019).
The DSDCH aims to build on previous work and recent research into our experience of cultural heritage and measuring its impact. The Europeana Impact Playbook continues to influence through projects like the SmartSquare in Hamburg, demonstrating how cultural heritage can revitalise our urban landscapes. Europeana’s self-guided walking tours and Data Conversations for Impact project, as well as Andy Corrigan’s Encountering Digital Collections project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12704347), explore these ideas and provide inspiration to innovate. These projects provide new ways to think about using our cultural heritage and build the confidence required to be more creative about how we approach automation.
Librarians and archivists don’t have the answers to automation and AI anxiety, but we do have the knowledge and methods that can help navigate data and information, translating them into wisdom and experience. Taking to our feet and participating in hybrid walking methodologies is a method that encourages creative and collaborative ideas and outputs, it makes the experience of cultural heritage more dynamic. This empirical workshop shows how automation can be balanced through renewed human interaction and consideration of how the environmental impact of our digital infrastructures relates to the real world location of Trondheim. A constructive process rather than destructive or anti-technology, situating the important role our staff have in mediating the digital – the bit we’re pretty sure AI can’t do very well.
The workshop, led by the DSDCH co-chairs, and facilitated and assisted by members of the working group. Before the conference they will identify relevant content and prepare challenges for participants to consider during the workshop that will relate the infrastructure of Trondheim to our digital infrastructures. Practical aspects, like accessibility and weather, are inherent to the method, requiring participants to respond to any challenges they might encounter. This presents an opportunity to develop skills and confidence, adapting to the agile and experimental nature of digital scholarship that the DS Topic Guides seek to support.
Following a short introduction participants will split into small groups, each setting out to different areas of Trondheim in the spirit of a flâneur or dérive, to explore and consider the challenges they face. Participants will use mobile devices to document their experience during the workshop and this evidence will tell a story about what we can learn from our experience in Trondheim. Any text, images, photos, audio, GPS data, scans created will be collected in a shared Google Drive or GitHub repository and made available/presented after the event. Using Peripleo, we will compile a gazetteer of this experience, creating a legacy of the event that can continue to develop the work of the DSDCH working group.