On 5 February, Dr. Sunkyu Lee and Dawn Zhuang presented a workshop titled "Semantic Image Annotation for Art Historians" for the KU Leuven Art History Research Group.
The workshop provided a conceptual and hands-on introduction to integrating digital image annotation into research workflows. Participants worked with IMMARKUS (https://immarkus.xmarkus.org/), a semantic image annotation service designed by the RegInfra group that supports assembling and organizing image collections with metadata, annotating specific regions, building custom data models, and linking related elements within and across images. IMMARKUS also offers AI-assisted region selection, multilingual transcription and translation, and a built-in knowledge graph for visualizing and querying annotations, relationships, and metadata.
The workshop covered how to:
- collect and organize images and archival sources (including IIIF resources)
- annotate image regions with or without AI assistance
- transcribe and translate text in images using integrated AI models across multiple languages
- create custom data models to structure and organize annotations
- store and manage metadata
- visualize, query, and export annotated data for further analysis