A key output from the project “Museum Visitor Experience and the Responsible Use of AI to Communicate Colonial Collections” (AHRC BRAID, PI Dr. Joanna Tidy, Sheffield). Working with Leeds Royal Armouries to scope the attitudes of public and industry stakeholders towards AI technologies, this project explored their potential to be applied thoughtfully and responsibly to help investigate and ultimately communicate the colonial histories threaded throughout the Armouries’ collection.
This combined workbook and toolkit contains observations, approaches, and activities for museum and heritage professionals who are wanting to explore whether and how AI technologies (broadly defined) can assist them in navigating the complexities, sensitivites, and responsibilities of curating and caring for heritage that is the product of colonial histories. The aim is to steer away from ‘solutionist’ applications and attitudes, and encourage instead critical reflection.
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Authorship
Many people contributed their time, expertise, and energy to the project and to the creation of this resource. The project team were Joanna Tidy, Sam Smith, Alison Needham and Benjamin Barrow at the University of Sheffield, Marjory Da Costa-Abreu at Sheffield Hallam University, Amy Gaeta and Beryl Pong at the University of Cambridge, and Richard A Carter at the University of York. Mark Bennett joined all the dots at the Royal Armouries Museum and staff from across the museum were generous with their time, ideas, and knowledge. The project team talked to and learned from many people working in museums and heritage institutions throughout the UK, including the 50 museum and heritage professionals who took part in a workshop on colonially acquired collections and AI use at the Royal Armouries Museum in June 2024. Livi Adu (muchaduabout.com) and Tania Duarte from We and AI (weandai.org) provided expertise, input into workshop design, and contributed to running the workshop. Livi advised extensively on this resource. The project was guided and made possible by the prior and ongoing work of many others in relation both to museum decolonisation and AI ethics.
Design
The report document itself was designed by me. The key challenge was how to visually communicate an intersection of AI technologies and non-European art without lapsing into problematic (and well worn) tropes of digital numbers, pixel graphics, and blue wireframes. It was settled to use geometric tile designs of the kind seen throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and India, whose visual structures are a direct product of the rich mathematical heritage of these regions that have ultimately been foundational for modern digital technologies – as well as being associated with key geographies in the Royal Armouries collection. The combinatory mathematics that are inherent to tile based designs gesture towards the generative operations of contemporary AI systems, and this aspect was further represented by a series of illustrations throughout the report that loosely explore the different structural relations and ‘sets’ that these combinations instantiate – being the atomic units of generative potenial seen within all digital logics, ‘AI’ or otherwise.