A holistic approach to collection digitisation of an 18th century amber cabinet from the Victoria and Albert Museum

The talk was delivered on 26th Match 2025 by Kira Zumkley, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This lecture will highlight work carried out at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London between 2023 and 2025. It focuses on the journey of an 18th century amber cabinet through various digitisation stages including documentary and studio photography, x-ray and reflectance transformation imaging. Such a holistic approach to collection digitisation is a rare occurrence within a very busy museum environment, yet it can often inspire further research and unforeseen engagement and collaboration which brings additional benefits to both the museum and the public – as has been the case with this cabinet.

Kira Zumkley is the Head of Photography and Digitisation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London. Her research focuses on how digital imaging assets of historic objects are perceived and understood and how these assets can enhance engagement with the physical object. Prior to working at the V&A, Kira Zumkley was the Photography Manager at the Science Museum Group and Chair of the Association for Fine Art and Historical Photography (AHFAP). Since 2018 she is also an honorary lecturer at the University College London Centre for Digital Humanities.

The intersection of book conservation, codicology and digital humanities

The talk was delivered on 19th Match 2025 by Alberto Campagnolo, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This lecture explores the intersection of book conservation, codicology, and digital humanities, focusing on how we investigate the material aspects of historical books and manuscripts through advanced digital tools. At the Book Heritage Lab at KU Leuven, we examine structural and visual elements of documentary heritage, applying methodologies that capture details essential for both conservation and scholarly research. Examples from ongoing projects—including methods for visualizing manuscript gathering structures—will demonstrate how digital tools document, preserve, and reveal new perspectives on the physical narratives embedded in historical texts. This session covers emerging methodologies and considers both challenges and possibilities for those working at the crossroads of traditional and digital approaches to heritage.

Alberto Campagnolo (ORCID: 0000-0002-8672-8400) trained as a book conservator in Spoleto, Italy, and has worked at institutions such as the Vatican Library. He holds a degree in Conservation of Library and Archive Materials from Ca’ Foscari University Venice and an MA in Digital Culture and Technology from King’s College London. He completed his PhD at the Ligatus Research Centre, University of the Arts London, focusing on the automated visualization of historical bookbinding structures. Currently, he is Assistant Professor and Director of the Book Heritage Lab at KU Leuven and Senior Researcher on the ERC-funded PRIMA project, investigating modern manuscript codicology. Alberto collaborates with Dot Porter on the VisColl project, a tool for modeling the gathering structures of books in codex format. Additionally, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Paper Conservation and is on the Executive Board of the IADA (International Association of Book and Paper Conservators).

Talk Title: Repurposing in AI: A Distinct Approach or an Extension of Creative Problem Solving?

The talk was delivered on 26 February 2025 by Aissatou Diallo, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Creativity is defined as the ability to produce novel, useful, and surprising ideas. A sub area of creativity is creative problem solving, the capacity of an agent to discover novel and previously unseen ways to accomplish a task, according to its perspective. While creative problem solving has been extensively studied in AI, the related concept of repurposing – identifying and utilizing existing resources in innovative ways to address different problems from their intended purpose – has received less formal attention. This paper presents a theoretical framework that distinguishes repurposing from creative problem solving by formalizing both approaches in terms of conceptual spaces, resource properties, and goal achievement mechanisms. We demonstrate that while creative problem solving involves expanding the conceptual space through transformation functions, repurposing operates within existing conceptual spaces by leveraging shared properties of available resources. This formalization provides new insights into how these two approaches to problem-solving differ in their fundamental mechanisms while potentially complementing each other in practical applications..