Building Blocks for a Virtual Time Machine: From Book CT to Automated Art Understanding

An abstract is usually brief, it must do almost as much work as Time travel is an old dream of mankind that is fueled by fascination and curiosity. Of course, such a journey through time goes far beyond our physical possibilities today. Historical science largely recapitulates the past using text, while the creative industry reproduces it as a more or less well-researched fiction. The Time Machine Initiative has now taken on the task of digitizing and processing the cultural heritage on a large scale in order to create new virtual accesses to the past, which - taking into account the fragmentary tradition - come close to a journey through time. In a large-scale interdisciplinary and trans-European research project, a kind of edition of European history is to be created which, as a data-saturated reconstruction, can create a new form of comprehensibility and experience. The time machine would therefore be a virtual research environment. In order to reach this ambitious goal, digitization and automated analysis of history and art has to be taken one step at a time. In the presentation, we shortly describe the project and present concrete research results that have been obtained in this direction ranging from book CT, i.e., the scanning of a whole book in a single scan, over writer and font identification up to first results on automated art analysis and understanding.