The Amsterdam Time Machine theme combines the faculty’s research into the city of Amsterdam. The aim is to build a spatio-temporal infrastructure that provides access to the 'Big Data' about the history of the city and its inhabitants, and connects this data with the data about the contemporary city. A consortium of partners from research, cultural heritage, social partners and the creative industries in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Europe is working on a research and development agenda to realize this infrastructure and to develop models and components that also work for other local Time Machines. Within the UvA we are exploring programmatic connections with the researchers of the Center for Urban Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences (around the themes of Urban Planning and Smart Cities / Datafied Society) and with the Faculty of Science through the university-wide Research Priority Area Human(e) AI (among others, researchers from the Informatics Institute group on Intelligent Sensory Information Systems participate in the CLARIAH and European Time Machine projects).

The Performing Arts theme brings together the faculty's research into the history of music, theatre and film culture (now also broadened to include nightlife culture in general) in Amsterdam and the Netherlands. Comparative research is also carried out, both locally and nationally as well as internationally (e.g. through collaboration with the AHRC project European Cinema Audiences at Oxford Brookes University, for which the CREATE Lab has provided services, and with the FWO infrastructure project CINECOS at Ghent University, in which we are included as partner). The focus of this programme was initially on building up and expanding structured datasets with locations, performances, works and persons, such as OnStage, FELIX, Cinema Context and the Opera Repertoire database. As a result, CREATE is also actively approached by heritage institutions in the city, such as UvA’s own Special Collections at the University Library, the National Opera & Ballet, and Paradiso, and seeks a connection with faculty researchers and teachers who can use these data in research and education.

The AI for Cultural Heritage theme focuses on technical research in Artificial Intelligence and data science, its application to Cultural Heritage and its use in the Arts & Humanities. AI (machine learning) has been growing in importance over the past ten years, mainly due to advances in its capacity to automate increasingly complex tasks and to the availability of ever larger amounts of data (big data). The Cultural Heritage sector, and the research community from the Arts & Humanities most engaged with it, has also witnessed an increase in the application of AI techniques to growing digital collections. After a promising start, much further research is needed to fully exploit the potential of AI in the Cultural Heritage sector.

The main areas of application of AI to Cultural Heritage collections include, but are not limited to: data extraction and augmentation (e.g., Handwritten/Optical Character Recognition), structured information extraction (e.g., event extraction), enrichment and creation of data/metadata (e.g., visual link retrieval), search and retrieval systems, engagement and creativity (e.g., generative AI art), fundamental methodological research questions (e.g., model interpretability, active and transfer learning, multimodality). CREATE is uniquely positioned within the Humanities Faculty, to create a crossroad and foster the transdisciplinary collaborations which are required to fully deliver on the potential of AI for Cultural Heritage.

Humanities scholars engage with a broad spectrum of societally-relevant questions and debates. It is common, for humanists, engage with society in diverse ways which include, but are not limited to publications. Examples are curating exhibitions and other cultural initiatives and writing pieces for a broader readership via newspapers, books and social media. While scholarly publications are not the only means to have an impact, it is reasonable to assume that they cover this broad range of interests and contributions that humanities scholars do.

The Impact of the Humanities theme focuses on assessing the societal relevance and impact of humanities research. We do so by developing text analytics to assess to what degree humanities scholarship focuses on the same topics discussed in societal debates in e.g., newspapers and other outlets (relevance). We also study if societal debates are directly influenced and changed by humanities scholarship (impact). In a pilot study we found that, for the past twenty years, humanities research in the Netherlands has contributed highly relevant work engaging with several prominent societal debates, particularly with themes such as the economy, energy, immigration, politics and geopolitics, society and culture and technology.