An Analytics of Culture: Modeling Subjectivity, Scalability, Contextuality, and Temporality

Abstract: There is a bidirectional relationship between culture and AI; AI models are increasingly used to analyse culture, thereby shaping our understanding of culture. On the other hand, the models are trained on collections of cultural artifacts thereby implicitly, and not always correctly, encoding expressions of culture. This creates a tension that both limits the use of AI for analysing culture and leads to problems in AI with respect to cultural complex issues such as bias. One approach to overcome this tension is to more extensively take into account the intricacies and complexities of culture. We structure our discussion using four concepts that guide humanistic inquiry into culture: subjectivity, scalability, contextuality, and temporality. We focus on these concepts because they have not yet been sufficiently represented in AI research. We believe that possible implementations of these aspects into AI research leads to AI that better captures the complexities of culture. In what follows, we briefly describe these four concepts and their absence in AI research. For each concept, we define possible research challenges.