During the early days of May, AvoinGLAM hosted a co-creation event AI Sauna that brought practitioners of Open Culture from Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Open Future, Flickr Foundation, Meemoo and others together with representatives from Finnish memory institutions and research projects.
The event kicked off on Monday morning the 6th of May with inspiring talks that led the participants through listening to idea creation in the magnificent old reading room of the National Archives of Finland. The speakers brought inspiring perspectives into the discussion around the impact of AI in the shared online culture from many directions.
- Building Civilized AI – Osma Suominen from the National Library of Finland (Annif & FintoAI) presented 5 important points in working with AI in the library context.
- Creating and Using a National Linked Open Data Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage Applications and Digital Humanities Research: Lessons Learned – Eero Hyvönen, Director Aalto University Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) Dept. of Computer Science; Professor University of Helsinki, Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), presented the Sampos, 21 linked data repositories created over 20 years, ranging from data on museums, students, war events, books, law and more.
- Human led, A.I. assisted – Fiona Romeo, from the Culture & Heritage team at the Wikimedia Foundation, discussed the organisation’s role in supporting Wikimedia projects.
- Future Audiences – Johan Jönsson presented the latest AI experiments of the Future Audiences team at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he works as Movement Communications Manager.
- A Generated Family of Man – George Oates, Director of the Flickr Foundation, presented the exploration of AI image generation using Flickr images inspired by the iconic 1955 exhibition The Family of Man at MoMA, organised by Edward Steichen.
- Harnessing AI and Databases for Wikipedia – Kaj Arnö from the MariaDB Foundation, which oversees the development and maintenance of the MariaDB open source relational database management system, presented their approach to AI. Together with Robert Silén, he coordinates the work of Projekt Fredrika, which focuses on the representation of the Swedish in the Finnish Wikipedia.
- Open in AI – Connor Benedict, Open Culture Coordinator at Creative Commons, discussed the intersection of AI and open culture, highlighting the opportunities and challenges it presents.
- Democratizing AI by cultivating a commons-based approach – Alicja Peszkowska, from Open Future Foundation, talked about the importance of democratizing AI development and usage and emphasized the need to counteract the concentration of power and promote open access to technology.
→ If you missed the event, you can still watch the inspire talks and the following panel discussion on the event playlist on AvoinGLAM YouTube channel or read the recap in This Month in GLAM.
Before the hacking/co-creation/brainstorming could begin, we invited all guests to enjoy a sauna and a swim in the 9°C seawater at Allas Sea Pool at the Helsinki harbor.
On the following Tuesday morning, the work started at URBAN3 at Maria01, which is the home base for Open Knowledge Finland, AvoinGLAM and Wikimedia Finland. The roughly 4 hours of work was enough to create a plethora of outstanding projects.
- Dreaming of workflow for digital humanities Sarianna Silvonen, Julia Matveeva, Saga Jacksen, Ari Häyrinen
- Governance of a collaborative visual name authority Bart, Alicja
- Generate alt-texts for historical images Osma Suominen, Mona Lehtinen, Harri Hihnala, Julia Isotalo, Lu Chen, Vertti Luostarinen
- Vector database of Senates Justice Department Juho Inkinen, Atte Föhr, Mikko Lipsanen, Ilkka Jokipii
- Tagging Short Fiction with AI Writing Atlas (Jennifer 8. Lee & Kevin Payravi)
- Designing Human Scale Preference Signals Connor, George, Christos, Sophea, Julia (see slides)
- AI for Wikimedia Commons Ferdinando Traversa, Jen S., TuukkaH, Tohaomg, Piracalamina
- Using open clip model for searching Journalistic photo archive photos Kimmo Virtanen (see slides)
- Question: How to make promoting multilinguality easier in a digital service like Finna? Susanna Eklund & Niko Partanen, National Library of Finland (see slides)
- Truths or truisms: How to evaluate AI texts? Heikki Kastemaa (see slides)
- Future conversations Johan, Future Audiences
The stream containing these presentations will be available on the AvoinGLAM YouTube channel at a later point.
Further ideas from the Ideas page:
- Authorship of political artists and Embodied creative process in the context glassblowing by Liisi Soroush
- Hot topics in the Finnish local letters of the 1860s TuulaP
- GenAI for Moroccan Arabic Ideophagous
- History of the Basque Country in 100 objects
- Summary of all knowledge Susanna
The documentation is forever on AI Sauna pages on Wikimedia Meta, so you can ping the creators and continue work on interesting topics. The project ideas can be found on the Project ideas page, and contacts to most of the participants on the People page.
Check out the slides for Monday and Tuesday that are also available, or the image category on Wikimedia Commons.
Let’s bathe on!
