Uncovering Latent Connections in Indigenous Heritage: Semantic Pipelines for Cultural Preservation in Brazil

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zerkowski, Luis Vitor, Hirata, Nina S. T.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zerkowski, Luis Vitor
Hirata, Nina S. T.
author_facet Zerkowski, Luis Vitor
Hirata, Nina S. T.
contents Indigenous communities face ongoing challenges in preserving their cultural heritage, particularly in the face of systemic marginalization and urban development. In Brazil, the Museu Nacional dos Povos Indigenas through the Tainacan platform hosts the country's largest online collection of Indigenous objects and iconographies, providing a critical resource for cultural engagement. Using publicly available data from this repository, we present a data-driven initiative that applies artificial intelligence to enhance accessibility, interpretation, and exploration. We develop two semantic pipelines: a visual pipeline that models image-based similarity and a textual pipeline that captures semantic relationships from item descriptions. These embedding spaces are projected into two dimensions and integrated into an interactive visualization tool we also developed. In addition to similarity-based navigation, users can explore the collection through temporal and geographic lenses, enabling both semantic and contextualized perspectives. The system supports curatorial tasks, aids public engagement, and reveals latent connections within the collection. This work demonstrates how AI can ethically contribute to cultural preservation practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10911
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncovering Latent Connections in Indigenous Heritage: Semantic Pipelines for Cultural Preservation in Brazil
Zerkowski, Luis Vitor
Hirata, Nina S. T.
Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
I.2.m
Indigenous communities face ongoing challenges in preserving their cultural heritage, particularly in the face of systemic marginalization and urban development. In Brazil, the Museu Nacional dos Povos Indigenas through the Tainacan platform hosts the country's largest online collection of Indigenous objects and iconographies, providing a critical resource for cultural engagement. Using publicly available data from this repository, we present a data-driven initiative that applies artificial intelligence to enhance accessibility, interpretation, and exploration. We develop two semantic pipelines: a visual pipeline that models image-based similarity and a textual pipeline that captures semantic relationships from item descriptions. These embedding spaces are projected into two dimensions and integrated into an interactive visualization tool we also developed. In addition to similarity-based navigation, users can explore the collection through temporal and geographic lenses, enabling both semantic and contextualized perspectives. The system supports curatorial tasks, aids public engagement, and reveals latent connections within the collection. This work demonstrates how AI can ethically contribute to cultural preservation practices.
title Uncovering Latent Connections in Indigenous Heritage: Semantic Pipelines for Cultural Preservation in Brazil
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
I.2.m
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10911