Curators in the loop: human-centred AI for the digital curation of cultural heritage collections

|February 9, 2027 | 13:00 — 16:00|Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa|

The workshop ‘CAIR 2027 – Curators in the loop: human-centred AI for the digital curation of cultural heritage collections’ will take place as an event co-located with the 21st International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC27), on February 9, 2027, from 13:00 to 16:00, at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon.

Digital curation of cultural heritage collections is increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence: metadata is generated by models, texts transcribed by handwriting recognition, entities linked automatically, descriptions drafted by large language models. Each step reshapes the curator’s role; often silently, and rarely by design.

The prevailing framing of “human-in-the-loop” collapses to the curator as reviewer of model output, understating the interpretive labour, disciplinary craft, and community accountability that curation practice carries. Responding to the IDCC27 theme, “FAIR DO’s: Centring People in the Stewardship and Curation of Digital Objects,” this workshop convenes work that pushes past oversight toward a richer account of curator-AI collaboration, as a design problem, an empirical research problem, and a governance problem.

We invite contributions across four areas:

  1. design frameworks and interaction patterns for curator-facing AI systems;
  2. empirical studies of curator experience with AI-augmented workflows;
  3. methodological and critical reflections on curator agency, expertise, and craft;
  4. community, participatory, and governance approaches to AI in cultural heritage. Contributions from early-career researchers, practitioners, and community-based scholars are explicitly encouraged.

Objectives:

To bring together researchers and practitioners across AI, HCI, digital humanities, and cultural heritage; consolidate an initial map of design patterns, evaluation methods, and open questions for curator-centred AI; and seed a community of practice with a shared post-workshop report and future position paper (e.g., for the International Council on Archives).

Important dates

  • Submission deadline: 11 December 2026
  • Notification to authors: 15 January 2027
  • Camera-ready due: 22 January 2027
  • Workshop:9 February 2027


This worshop is organised by the DAViD Lab, Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon.