Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce a new Special Issue “Artificial Intelligence in Digital Humanities” of the journal Big Data and Cognitive Computing.

Recent advances in specialized equipment and computational methods have had a significant impact on the digital humanities and, particularly, cultural heritage and archaeology research. Nowadays, digital technology applications contribute on a daily basis to recording, preservation, research and dissemination in the digital humanities. Digitization is the defining practice that bridges science and technology with the humanities, either in tangible or in the intangible forms. The digital replicas enable a wide range of studies, opening new horizons in humanities research. Advances in artificial intelligence and its successful application in core technical domains brings new possibilities to support humanities research in particularly demanding and challenging tasks.

AI applications in humanities research have a significant impact on multi-model and multi-dimensional information sharing and the representation of knowledge, enabling a reflection on historical trends, culture and identity. AI has already been used in a diverse set of applications, ranging from effective asset organization and knowledge representation to virtual and cyber archaeology, advanced and extended visualization, asset and context interpretation, intelligent tools, personalized access, and to gamification and public dissemination.

This Special Issue focuses on the forthcoming future of artificial intelligence applications in digital humanities, including recent developments ranging from deep and reinforcement learning approaches to recommendation technologies in the extended reality domain.

AI is currently reshaping humanities research, and the following research areas are just broad indicative cases of this evolution: digitization and preventive preservation with AI; interpretation and restoration with AI; predictive modelling with AI; heritage analytics with AI; dissemination with AI; personalization and inclusive design with AI.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

- Advanced, multi-scale, multi-modal and automated digitization;
- Big data approaches in digital humanities;
- From digital to cyber humanities;
- Preventive preservation;
- Climate change and heritage protection;
- Decoding of ancient epigraph marks;
- Deciphering of ancient languages, texts, epigraphs;
- Automatic restoration of lost texts and images;
- Predictive modeling in humanities research;
- Digital resources with open linked data and semantic web capacity;
- Advanced analysis and annotation of artifacts;
- AI approaches in heritage science and physicochemical analysis;
- Authentication, traceability and prevention of illicit trafficking;
- Citizen science, and citizen involvement;
- Extended (virtual, augmented, etc.) reality applications;
- Advanced personalization and recommender technologies;
- Inclusive design.