Last year Dr Oonagh Murphy from Goldsmiths and I have been running the Museums + AI network, funded by the AHRC. This action research project brought together a range of senior museum professionals and prominent academics to develop the conversation around AI, ethics, and museums.
We hosted two research events, one at Goldsmiths (London) and one at Pratt Institute (New York). You can find the reports of these two events on the project’s website and a great summary by Mia Ridge on her blog. The network has also engaged with more than 200 members of the public through events at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York) and The Barbican Centre (London).
Through these conversations, workshops, and public events we challenged current practice, engaged with wider critical technology discourse and iteratively developed a series of worksheets with professionals from 15 museums, and 6 universities in both countries. We also engaged with policy makers and funders as a means to situate these development tools within a wider cultural policy context. We covered both the application of AI technologies to collection and visitor data and what were the strategic, operational, ethical opportunities and challenges in each case.
In the upcoming months, we will be publishing a toolkit for museum professionals interested in running an AI project and a series of research publications and talks discussing in-depth the topics covered during these events. Check the https://themuseumsai.network/ for updates about upcoming events and publications.
Featured image credit: Sketch note by @merielroyal
