The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund is awarding £192,500 to King’s College London to support the development of Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives, a project that will explore how UK moving image archives could creatively explore emerging artificial intelligence technologies (AI) in meeting the challenges and the opportunities presented for the archives and their collections.
Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives (ISSA) is designed by King’s College London, through a collaboration between its Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab. ISSA aims to advance understanding of the opportunities presented in working with AI, and to develop the tools and skills to support audiovisual collections in their vital work documenting, developing, and sharing moving image heritage.
Rishi Coupland, BFI Director of Research and Industry Innovation, says: “AI technologies have the potential to unlock enormous potential for screen archives of all scales, however in this fast-moving space we need a much more comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and the challenges facing audiovisual collections. This project led by King’s College London will provide new tools, skills and insights to establish an R&D framework that could benefit the wider sector in integrating AI technologies in the institutional fabric of moving image archives, while ensuring that we prioritise considerations such as copyright and ethical perspectives.”
Dr Daniel Chávez Heras, ISSA Principal Investigator and Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King’s College London: “We are reaching a critical inflection point in which we have to define the role that AI technologies are going to play in social life, including how we want these technologies to mediate our relationship with over a century of film and television. This is too important to be left to a handful of large companies, so I am delighted that ISSA has been awarded through the BFI Innovation Challenge Fund to enable deep collaboration between King’s College London and moving image archives across the UK. This is an exciting project that builds towards critical, responsible and public AI systems.”
The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London is the largest and oldest of its kind worldwide, it is internationally recognised for producing leading research into the applications and implications of technology on contemporary society, including a track record of interdisciplinary projects for the understanding of culture through advanced computational methods. King’s Digital Lab is a research software engineering team based in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. The lab manages over one hundred digital projects collected over the past two decades, engaging widely with other higher education institutions, with libraries, museums, cultural heritage bodies, and with the performing arts and creative industries sector.
The project will run over 30 months and is scheduled to complete in 2027. It comprises four main areas of activity:
- the development of a technical prototype to enable AI experimentation with moving image collections, including modules for data enrichment, exploration, retrieval, and interaction;
- alongside developing the prototype, a programme of workshops delivered with six different archive partner organisations to test the prototype with their collection and enable meaningful user research about AI systems in the cultural sector;
- the development of a publicly accessible code repository and knowledge base, sharing outcomes from the workshops, tools and processes, and providing insight on the best practice developed as a result; and
- drawing on the learnings from all of this work, KCL will publish a list of the common requirements and sector gaps that emerge, which can be used to attract future funding and inform strategic decisions about working with AI in moving image archives.
The project brings together five film and television archive partners across the four UK nations through the BFI’s network of screen heritage specialists: National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Northern Ireland Screen, North West Film Archive, and Yorkshire Film Archive, in collaboration with King’s Digital Lab, to develop the knowledge, tools, and skills required to rethink how AI technologies could be integrated into the institutional fabric of moving image archives. Film Archives UK will also be involved in the project workshop…
The ISSA project is taking a human-centred approach to technology development. In practice, this means prioritising the needs, preferences and expectations of end-users and stake holders, such as archivists, curators, and members of the public who engage with audiovisual collections. The aim is to collectively rethink the archive and its practices in the context of emerging AI technologies.
The call for projects exploring how AI technologies can advance the potential of screen archives is part of the BFI’s wider exploration of what AI means for the future of the screen sector. Broader issues such as how this technology might affect areas such as production, training or skills are all being explored separately through sector consultation and research, and insights from this may lead to a future Innovation Challenge Call.
The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund, as part of the BFI’s National Lottery Funding Plan, 2023-2026, seeks to support new solutions to the UK screen sector’s most critical challenges. Between 2024 and 2026, up to £1.8 million will be distributed across up to six challenges, to help not-for-profit organisations to innovate, developing new approaches to persistent problems, whilst also gaining insights that benefit the whole screen sector.
The Innovation Challenge Fund’s first call focused on the video games industry, followed by the AI for screen archives. The third challenge call which closed last week is addressing new solutions to accelerate the research and innovation around equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) data monitoring, and support the development of the best possible system to support the sector.
