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Note / 5 November 2026

Presented at EuroMed2026: From Disclosure to Return

5 November 2026

On 4 November I presented “From Disclosure to Return: Designing Accountable AI-Assisted Interpretive Pathways for Cultural Heritage” in Session 7 of EuroMed2026 (Beyond Digitisation: Unlocking the Power of Cultural Heritage – Use & Reuse, Part II). EuroMed is the Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage. This 20th-anniversary edition ran online from 2 to 4 November, organised by the UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage at the Cyprus University of Technology and Heritage Malta, and drew 234 abstracts.

AI tools now summarise collections, translate them and write pathways through them at a scale no museum could staff. The fluency hides the link between what the visitor reads and the record, rights and judgement behind it. The talk proposes four linked practices:

  • Provenance disclosure: say whether an output rests on a specific record, catalogue metadata, a rights-cleared source, a composite dataset or synthetic generation.
  • Contextual accountability: show uncertainty, gaps, contested descriptions and who is responsible, where the visitor meets the output.
  • Reciprocal access: give visitors, record creators and affected communities a way to question, correct, add context or refuse a framing.
  • Return: record how those responses change descriptions, interfaces, training data or governance.

I’m now writing the full paper. I’m also looking for a museum, library or archive that wants to test this with its own public in a Room: a working session where an institution and its visitors decide something together, with a published record of who contributed what.

Programme: https://euromed2026.eu/e-agenda