With a collaboration with Northumbria University, a visual search platform is being developed that could revolutionize how the museum, library, and gallery collections are searched. Globally, as collections are increasingly presented online, deep Discoveries will provide a unique offering. In progress, computer vision projects were launched to explore possibilities Identify Identification and matching of photographs throughout digitized collections on a national scale.
To facilitate the partnership between The National Archives, The University of Surrey and The V&A Museum, Newcastle University’s Jo Briggs and Jamie Steane were enlisted as experts from Northumbria School of Design. In contrast to typed searches, visual search has, you insert an image instead of typing keywords then relies on computer vision artificial intelligence (AI) to merge similar images based on colour, pattern, and other criteria. At a later stage, Andy Cain and Jo, along with Jamie and Jo from Northumbria, became close collaborators, sharing information and developing the user experience. They were challenged to show how AI reasoning works and describe the platform’s search criteria visually. In the design phase, Jo said: “We developed animations shared over video calls to inform our discussions about the best way to portray fairly complex search functions in the interfaces.” He built the prototype platform at the National Archives as a Research Software Engineer.
According to him, creating a design in order to accommodate the diverse perspectives of the teams involved in this multi-disciplinary project, we were able to develop a live prototype.” DARIAH “Interfaces,” this year’s theme of the annual conference, was the theme of Jo’s and Bernard’s presentations at the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH).
Lora Angelova, national archives’ Head of Conservation Research and Audience Development, commented: “The creativity and innovation of the team have given the project a new perspective on visually expressing the benefits of deploying AI.”