Exploring Nordic Texts and Cultural AI: Workshops with Peter Leonard
Over two days in mid-September, the CORE Collective hosted two inspiring workshops led by Peter Leonard, academic librarian and digital humanities expert
The sessions brought together researchers across disciplines to explore the intersection of cultural heritage, machine learning, and critical inquiry.
In the first workshop, participants delved into the unexpected Danish corpus embedded in Google’s scans of U.S. academic libraries. This discovery raised important questions about metadata, model training, and the future of Nordic-language texts in the age of national large language models (LLMs).
The second workshop bridged art history and machine learning, as participants experimented with diffusion models and LoRA fine-tuning to engage with Danish Golden Age painting in new computational ways. The session also explored multimodal LLMs and how cultural heritage institutions might critically use image-captioning models to support both accessibility and scholarly description.
A warm thank you to all who joined — and especially to Peter Leonard for sparking new conversations at the intersection of culture, computation, and critical reflection.