Conference Agenda

The presentation examines the application of IIIF viewers to the analysis of intermedial and skeuomorphic designs in ancient Egyptian portable manuscripts (papyri, ostraca, and linen). Through comparative study of high-resolution images from global collections, the project identifies visual borrowings from monumental media and material mimicry (e.g., of stone), thereby illuminating their cultural and ritual significance. By combining visual computing techniques (including image recognition and AI) with IIIF tools, it produces 3D visualisations of diachronic trends, thereby advancing non-invasive and accessible research practices. Project outputs include a digital exhibition designed for public engagement, in alignment with IIIF priorities of innovative implementation, AI applications, pedagogical contexts, and heritage preservation. The work highlights IIIF's capacity to enrich interdisciplinary manuscript studies, with an emphasis on sustainability and the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence in cultural heritage.

This proposed lightning talk examines how digital technologies can support ethical access to sensitive cultural heritage materials in Kenya, with particular attention to the African context where cultural and Indigenous knowledge systems are predominantly oral. In Kenya, as in much of Africa, knowledge is transmitted through storytelling, performance, and community memory, often governed by cultural protocols that determine who may access, share, or interpret such knowledge. Digitization introduces both opportunities and risks, particularly when oral traditions are recorded and disseminated beyond their original cultural contexts.

Drawing on research and practical experience, the presentation highlights four categories of sensitive materials: sacred cultural knowledge, colonial-era photographic archives, community-restricted oral histories, and historically marginalized LGBTQ+ histories. These collections raise critical concerns around consent, ownership, representation, and the risk of exploitation, especially when Indigenous knowledge is extracted or shared without appropriate safeguards. The talk would further seek appropriate avenues on how the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) can be leveraged not only to enhance access but also to embed ethical protections.

This lightning talk draws on the Queer Asian Museum (QAM), a community-led organization building access frameworks for dispersed, sensitive, and multilingual materials — oral histories, ephemera, community-generated images, and born-digital artifacts — that resist traditional institutional workflows. I will show how pairing IIIF with emerging AI tools fundamentally changes who gets to run an archive: AI-powered transcription and translation make multilingual cataloging feasible for a one-person team, while AI-assisted metadata generation lets communities describe materials in their own voice rather than retrofitting institutional vocabularies.

Using queer Asian community collections as a case study, I will demonstrate a prototype virtual street tour built within IIIF — recreating endangered community spaces and linking dispersed individual archives into a navigable, consent-aware network. The presentation will address practical questions museum technologists face when supporting community partners: lightweight IIIF implementations, selective visibility for materials whose subjects face real-world harm, and how AI lowers the technical threshold enough that grassroots organizations can participate in interoperable digital heritage without waiting for institutional adoption.

Film, television and video games have been at the forefront of the possibilities of 3D technology for decades. Over that time, these fields have matured from scrappy projects, experimenting with what is possible, to mature industries with established practices.

Between animation and video games, there were distinct similarities and differences that I encountered in attempting to advance the state of their 3D software. I am excited about cultural heritage as a space that can leverage the learnings of commercial 3D art spaces and apply them to its own challenge of representing and archiving pieces that should last much longer than a movie production timeline. Attendees will walk away from this presentation with a greater excitement for 3D, a basic understanding of some of the current challenges being faced by entertainment technology and potential applications of those experiences to IIIF 3D.

A common practice when photographing museum collection objects and archival documents is the inclusion of a color correction bar. However this is superfluous to the display of the content itself, and a better experience for visitors is to see the cropped image that no longer includes this.

In this lightning talk I will show how we developed an open-source model that is able to run locally with comparatively few resources in order to identify the regions of an image occupied by these color correction charts. We will demonstrate how this can be used by anyone to identify regions in their own IIIF images to provide a level of correction even after the initial digitization work has finished. Finally we will demonstrate a proof-of-concept interface that uses IIIF as both source and output formats: to take images with color bars, and from this display both static and zoomable cropped versions of the images, using both the IIIF Image API and IIIF Presentation API.

Gotta love that Presentation API 4.0, right? I mean just imagine, now it's not just about images, it's about audio. And video. And 3D.

Time, and space, man. Time. And also space.

So what if I went looking for fun, but I went looking in those new places? The time. The space. And just ignored those old-fashioned two-dimensional images.

Kind of like IIIF, but without the second I.