I attended the keynote presentation on creation, access, and re-use of digitized cultural heritage assets by the International Council on Archives yesterday. A big point of the keynote was that a digitized image is a representation or interpretation of what the original material looked like shaped by certain decisions like file formats or resolution.
What stood out to me was when they said that AI is always used now to capture images. Smartphones and digital cameras all have automated AI processing for imaging (e.g. filter skin texture of people, make images more “clear”, automatic white balance). In archives, we might “digitize” a research request for someone remote by taking a photo of it with our phone or tablet. Or we receive digital files from photographers for community/university/corporate events.
Our peers and researchers don’t have that context to how digitization is a sum of technical decisions. They just see a photo. And most dialogue about digitization from people outside DAM/archives labor is about “why don’t you digitize everything” or they conflate digitization with digital preservation.
How do you think about digitization of images? Do you document your technical decisions? How do you see automated AI workflows happening in your labor?