Shin Koseki has been appointed to the advisory committee of the International Max Planck Research School for Multimodal Digital Humanities (IMPRS-MDH), a new international research initiative addressing a central methodological challenge in computational humanities: moving beyond monomodal analyses of text, image, and space toward genuinely multimodal forms of knowledge production. The program brings together art history, linguistics, digital humanities, and artificial intelligence to rethink how meaning, interpretation, and argumentation emerge across media and cultures.
The IMPRS-MDH explores how recent advances in multimodal machine learning can be used not simply as technical tools, but as objects of critical and epistemic inquiry. Its research focuses on modeling the interpretive frameworks of the humanities, examining how arguments are constructed through the interaction of words, images, gestures, and spatial forms, while simultaneously interrogating what AI systems normalize, privilege, or obscure. This work is structured around four interconnected research pathways, ranging from epistemic modeling of multimodal reasoning to cross-cultural studies of concepts as multimodal phenomena.
As a member of the advisory committee, Shin Koseki contributes expertise at the intersection of urban studies, landscape, and critical AI, with a particular focus on cultural interpretation, spatial reasoning, and responsible AI governance. His involvement supports the IMPRS-MDH’s ambition to establish multimodal digital humanities as a field in its own right, in collaboration with partner institutions including the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, the University of Zurich, and the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure, among others.
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