Computer vision and architectural history at eye level: Mixed methods for linking research in the humanities and in information technology (ArchiMediaL)

Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuable insights are gained into the past and the present as they...

Mixing Methods: Practical Insights from the Humanities in the Digital Age

Digitality is a cause and a consequence of different data cultures. It applies to the 10 research projects that are included in this volume. They are rooted in various humanities disciplines such as art history, philosophy, musicology, religious studies, architectural history, media studies, and literature studies. As diverse as the disciplines...

Roundtable I: Water and Heritage

Digital Excavation of Mediatized Urban Heritage: Automated Recognition of Buildings in Image Sources

Digital technologies provide novel ways of visualizing cities and buildings. They also facilitate new methods of analyzing the built environment, ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to crowdsourced citizen participation. Digital representations of cities have become so refined that they challenge our perception of the real. However,...

Introduction: Connecting Water and Heritage for the Future

Water has served and sustained societies throughout the history of humankind. People have actively shaped its course, form, and function for human settlement and the development of civilizations. Around water, they have created socioeconomic structures, policies, and cultures; a rich world of narratives, laws, and practices; and an extensive...

Creating a 4D Street View of Amsterdam from Historical Images

The ArchiMediaL project aims to bridge between data science and researches on contemporary and historical built environments by developing state of the art AI algorithms for the automatic linking of available meta-data and image repositories. As a case-study we use the 360,000+ historical images from the Amsterdam Beeldbank database.

Neither past nor present : Authenticity and late twentieth-century architectural heritage

It was the present moment. No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we have no time now...

Conference Report: 2019 International Conference Water as Heritage

The 2019 International Conference "Water as Heritage" took place 27-31 May 2019 in Chiayi, Taiwan. Organized by the Taiwan International Institute for Water Education, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Netherlands and the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development, it brought together key water...

Water Resilience: Creative Practices Past, Present and Future

Creative practices are at the heart of human history. Humans have responded creatively to a broad range of challenges—environmental, political, economic, social, religious, cultural—by shaping our tangible physical environment and our intangible cultural practices. Our present buildings, cities, and landscapes as well as our local cultures,...

Visual Content Analysis and Linked Data for Automatic Enrichment of Architecture-Related Images

Built form dominates the urban space where most people live and work and provides a visual reflection of the local, regional and global esthetical, social, cultural, technological and economic factors and values. Street-view images and historical photo archives are therefore an invaluable source for sociological or historical study; however,...

Mathematics and/as Humanities: Linking Humanistic Historical to Quantitative Approaches

The article reflects the state of mathematics between the natural sciences and the humanities. By arguing that mathematics is a humanities subject, it suggests a close connection between mathematics and urban morphology studies. This also applies to the discrepancy between quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. New types of...

Searching for Meiji-Tokyo: Heterogeneous Visual Media and the Turn to Global Urban History, Digitalization, and Deep Learning

Sight-seeing in the eyes of deep neural networks

We address the interpretability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for predicting a geo-location from an image. In a pilot experiment we classify images of Pittsburgh vs Tokyo and visualize the learned CNN filters. We found that varying the CNN architecture leads to variating in the visualized filters. This calls for further...

Activation and transfer of oxygen by some non-enzymatic model systems