Prize Question: Openness vs. Arcane Knowledge in the 21st Century
/0 Comments/by Jörg LehmannIn 1798, the Königliche Societät der Wissenschaften (Royal Society of Sciences) in Göttingen published the following prize question in the Reichs-Anzeiger: “How can the advantages that are possible through the wandering of craftsmen be promoted and the disadvantages that occur be prevented?” (“Wie können die Vortheile, welche durch das Wandern der Handwerksgesellen möglich sind, gefördert […]
Whose Openness? Whose Ethics?
/0 Comments/by Jörg LehmannOpenness can be described as one of the logics driving contemporary science and culture. The mechanism behind it is quite simple: Nation-states take a part of their tax revenues and invest them to finance science and culture, in the latter field for example the digitisation of cultural heritage. In return, research organisations and cultural (heritage) […]
Cultural Heritage Datasets, Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Non-Intervention
/0 Comments/by Jörg LehmannIt is a well-known fact that machine-learning algorithms exacerbate biases inherent in the datasets on which they were trained. In recent times, this fact has found ample evidence, e.g. in Cathy O’Neill’s book “Weapons of Math Destruction” (2016), in Kate Crawford’s and Trevor Paglen’s “Excavating AI” (2019), or in articles such as “Data and its […]