Disclaimer: the closed HAICu consortium meeting (only open for HAICu partners) starts already in the morning. The program in the afternoon - as it is displayed below - is free and open to everyone. In case of questions, please reach out to
Host: Eveline van Rijswijk
12.30 - 13.00 Walk-in
13.00 - 14.30 Plenary session
- Welcome by Johan Oomen (Sound & Vision, NISV)
- Inspirational lectures by Jo Guldi (30 min) and Džemila Šero (15 min)
- Q&A session
14:30 - 15:00 Break
15:00 - 16:00 Break-out groups
- Exploring the Landscape of Migration: Where not to go with AI? - Rana Klein (Sound & Vision, NISV/Innovation Lab Deep Journalism) and Michel de Gruijter (KB/Innovation Lab Limitations of AI)
- AI and Citizen Science for Natural History and Histories of Ordinary People - Anne Schulp (Naturalis) and Andreas Weber (UT/UG)
- From Discovery to Insight: Using AI to Open Heritage Collections - Simon Kemper (National Archive), Gauri Bhatnagar/Roeland Ordelman (Sound & Vision, NISV) and Hennie Brugman (KNAW Humanities Cluster - Digital Infrastructure)
- Ten years later: new societal questions about digitization, heritage, and AI - NWA Living History Route Steering Committee
16.00 - 16.30 Wrap-up
16.30 - 17.30 Drinks
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Inspirational lectures 13:00 – 14:30
Jo Guldi
Title: The Dissentometer: Benchmarking AI with Histories of Dissent and Consensus
Summary: As large language models increasingly shape what billions of people read and believe, questions of truth, bias, and trust have become central to both AI ethics and the humanities. The Dissentometer is an experiment in building interpretive AI—one that draws on historians’ methods of evidence evaluation to identify when a dataset or model reflects dissenting versus consensus-driven perspectives. Developed at the Center for the Future of Trust, the Dissentometer benchmarks digital and historical corpora for patterns of agreement, controversy, and silence. The project’s central hypothesis is that ethical AI begins with epistemic awareness: understanding not only what a system says, but whose voices it reflects. This talk presents experiments in creating consumer safety standards for AI based on benchmarks derived from studies in the natural language of how humanity speaks about events in the past, and, conversely, when AI accidentally mimics speech from an echo chamber or conspiracy theory. By combining natural language processing with the historian’s logic of contextual proof, our research quantifies how debates evolve over time —whether in the parliamentary debates or digital platforms like Wikipedia. Historians’ questions about who speaks of the past, which eras they profile and why can serve as a framework for auditing AI systems—revealing where consensus becomes hegemony, and dissent becomes innovation.
Biography: Jo Guldi, historian and data scientist, is professor of Data and Decision Sciences at Emory University, where she founded and co-directs the Center for the Future of Trust, an interdisciplinary lab whose projects sit at the intersection of history, artificial intelligence, and public reasoning. Guldi’s projects include the Dissentometer, a project for providing accurate AI benchmarks that measures patterns of dissent and consensus across historical and digital corpora; Democracy Viewer, a no-code platform for analyzing change in political speech; and Text Mining the Documentation of Climate Change, which applies natural language processing to trace evolving narratives about environment, policy, and responsibility. A former junior fellow at Harvard and member of the Brown History faculty, and author of award-winning books like The Long Land War and The History Manifesto, Guldi’s current research embodies not merely interdisciplinary but also hybrid scholarship, where computer science and historical research advance simultaneously. Her research has been covered by The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Papers of the National Academy of Science, The BBC, CBC, The Dig Podcast, NovaraFM Media, and many other social media and news outlets.
Džemila Šero
Title: Computer science, fingerprints, and art: state-of-art in the study of human impressions in cultural heritage
Abstract: Human impressions are often found on works of art and are always referred to as "fingerprints". In my talk, new scientific routes to study human impressions will be presented. From x-raying floating angels to matching fingerprints on 17th century models, my talk will revolve around the success story of mixing methods from forensics, art history, conservation, and biometrics. By uncovering what has been neglected for centuries, the overarching aim of this talk is to present the audience with frameworks that shine new light on the concept of authorship, and address future challenges in the field, especially with regard to the use of AI-assisted solutions.
Biography: Dzemila Sero is appointed as an Assistant Professor in Biometrics and Computer Vision at the University of Twente. She was awarded the prestigious L'Oreal-UNESCO Fellowship for Women in Science for her project "Heritage Biometrics" this year. She is currently a NIAS-KNAW Fellow. She was awarded twice the Migelien Gerritzen Fellowship at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands (CWI).
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Break-out groups 15:00 – 16:00
- Exploring the Landscape of Migration: Where not to go with AI?
AI promises to unlock heritage data for researchers. But this new map has ethical 'restricted areas'. In this session we embark on an expedition into the AI landscape. Guided by the insights of specialists and driven by a migration use case we will chart the AI 'no-go zones' together.
- AI and Citizen Science for Natural History and Histories of Ordinary People
This hands-on workshop gives you an insight into how HAICu research brings AI driven tools and citizen volunteers together. Next to new forms of annotation of graphically complex handwritten archives, we will also discuss how natural history and AI experts work together to reconstruct past climate, sea levels and changes in biodiversity. Central questions of this workshop are: How can we increase the societal relevance of archives that are difficult to interpret for AI driven solutions by large volunteer involvement? How can volunteers help enriching sparse examples to create valuable evidence for past climate and biodiversity research?
- From Discovery to Insight: Using AI to Open Heritage Collections
AI offers great opportunities to expand existing online heritage collections with new and better forms of access. Based on practical needs and problems, heritage institutions have started experimenting with Large Language Models and techniques such as R(etrieval) A(ugmented) G(eneration). In this short workshop, we will discuss their experiences, with special attention to both use cases and integration into existing technical infrastructures.
- Ten years later: new societal questions about digitization, heritage, and AI
Ten years after the question "Will digitization save our heritage?" was raised by citizens through the National Research Agenda (NWA). In this break-out open discussion session we explore with researchers and partners how this societal question is relevant today, and how such questions could be gathered in the future. We are curious how AI can contribute to the democratic and transparent collection and interpretation of societal questions and needs for knowledge and research. We do this as the "living history route" within the NWA to contribute to a renewed NWA agenda for 2026 and beyond. Will you join us?
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