Call for Postdoctoral Research Fellows in Digital Art History

Max Planck Research Group “Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing”

Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome

The Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History invites applications for postdoctoral research fellowships in digital and computational art history within the Max Planck Research Group “Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing,” led by Dr Leonardo Impett.

The group investigates the reciprocal relationship between artificial intelligence and visual culture. It combines digital and computational art history, critical AI studies, and the history of art and visual culture to study both AI as a cultural phenomenon and computational methods as tools for new historical research.

These fellowships are intended for researchers who wish to develop their work as part of a collaborative research group. Successful candidates will work closely with Dr Leonardo Impett and the Machine Visual Culture group, and will be expected to contribute actively to the group’s shared research agenda. Applications should therefore explain not only the applicant’s own research profile, but also how they would contribute to one of the following three projects.

• Intellectual Histories of Art History

This project uses distant reading, NLP, citation analysis, and other computational methods to study the intellectual and institutional histories of art history. Relevant materials may include art-historical writing, historiography, theory, criticism, catalogues, periodicals, archives, correspondence, bibliographies, and other corpora through which the discipline has defined its objects, methods, and concepts.

Fellows may work with large-scale published and archival corpora, including online journals and periodicals, bibliographic datasets, and the digitised holdings of the Bibliotheca Hertziana. In particular, the group can offer access, where appropriate, to digitised non-public holdings of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, including rare books and contemporary books relating to the art history of Rome and Naples. These collections are a distinctive strength of the institute and may support computational approaches to the history of art history.

• AI and Cross-, Inter-, and Multimodal Art History

This project develops AI-based, cross-, inter-, and multimodal approaches to art history and visual culture. It is concerned with how images, texts, metadata, archives, and other media can be related, compared, aligned, and interpreted through computational methods.

The group is a main partner in the International Max Planck Research School for Multimodal Digital Humanities (IMPRS-MDH), and fellows may work alongside doctoral researchers in that programme. The group is also involved in several international projects relating to multimodality, intermedial criticism, and multimodal AI. We especially welcome projects that combine historical, theoretical, and computational approaches to image-text relations, intermediality, vector-space methods, or multimodal models.

• Computational Ecological and Environmental Histories of Art and Visual Culture

This project is a new research strand within the group, concerned with developing computational approaches to the history of labour, ecology, and visual culture. We are especially interested in projects that combine ecological or environmental data with AI, distant viewing, computer vision, geospatial methods, or other computational approaches.

Projects might address, for instance, environmental imaginaries, landscape, extraction, climate, collections, or the ways computational methods can make visible relations between images, environments, and power.

Fellows will be expected to contribute to the intellectual and practical life of the group, including seminars, reading groups, workshops, shared methods development, and collaborative research outputs. Each fellow will normally be expected to lead one major collaborative publication during the fellowship. Depending on the project, fellows may also contribute to datasets, tools, research infrastructure, or future grant applications.

The group offers excellent computing facilities, methodological training, considerable computational resources, and the support of a full-time engineer/research scientist. This support is intended to enable ambitious research, not to replace the fellow’s own technical engagement. We are open to candidates from art history, visual culture, archaeology, and related fields who have some exposure to digital methods, as well as to candidates with stronger computational backgrounds. Applicants should, however, be able to implement, test, and critically evaluate computational methods with a degree of independ