Symposium: Digitised Visual Archives, AI and the Uses of the Past
Date: September 26, 2025
Time: 1:00 pm – 5:30 pm (CEST)
Location: VU Main Building Agora 1
Address: De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam
Organisation: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
What ethical challenges arise from the digitisation of European visual archives documenting sensitive histories of colonialism, war and violence?
Digitised archives now have the potential to build sustainable connections with source and stakeholder communities well beyond Europe, as well as within it. Stakeholder sensitivities, copyright laws, and restitution agreements regulate the use of archives. Yet social media and AI have opened up new ways of circulating digitised archive materials in ways that are hard to regulate. Meanwhile, historians, memory and media scholars are still grappling with the ‘analogue’ complexities of reconstructing historical contexts and explaining the contested use of visual sources in the present.
Mass digitisation of visual archives and the proliferation of AI raises the questions: who are digital archives for? What social and ‘scientific’ purposes do visual AI tools serve? And how might this impact how images are used as representations of the past? To what extent are AI tools actually driving digitisation of visual archives rather than serving this process? Computational methods have great potential for generating new taxonomies and turning ‘primary sources’ into ‘data’ that can be analysed at scale. But is a technology-driven framework producing ‘better’ history, and who is it improving accessibility for? Generative AI already has applications to harvesting ‘stock’ web-based images to produce new or edited visual icons of violence, atrocity, genocide, colonialism or war. If the extant icons of violence already circulate free from historical context, and constitute a narrow range of examples to begin with, what will new ‘averages’ produce, and what does that mean for the way these histories are perceived?
Attendance is free, but registration is required or email m.a.van.maanen@vu.nl
Programme
13.00 Professor Susie Protschky (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Welcome and Introduction
13.15 Professor Kim A. Wagner (Queen Mary University of London), Through the Perpetrator’s Eye: The Bud Dajo Massacre (1906) and Atrocity Photography
13.45 Professor Daniel Foliard (Université Paris Cité / LARCA), Binarized and Polarized? Contested Pasts and their Photographic Legacy in the Digital Age
14.15 Professor Kees Ribbens (Erasmus University Rotterdam / NIOD), AI Meets the Holocaust: History by Popular Demand?
15.30 Tea and coffee
15.30 Associate Professor Ana Dragojlovic-Éclair (University of Melbourne), Mending Matrilineality: Re-presencing Indigenous Foremothers
16.00 Dr Tintin Wulia (University of Gothenbug), Future Pasts: Revisioning Archival Aesthetics in the Age of Fungibility
16.30 Professor Karen Strassler (City University of New York), Demanding Images in the Public Archive
17.00 Questions and discussion
17.30 Close of symposium, drinks