8  Drawing Conclusions

Author

Andy Corrigan

Published

February 23, 2026

Modified

March 16, 2026

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8.1 Learning Objective

Understand the limitiatons of automation in order to be able to demonstrate your digital literacy.

Exhibit, IIIF Manifest

8.2 Summary

You can input IIIF manifests into lots of different tools, including ones that can apply machine learning and computer vision (yes - AI!).

8.3 Exercise

Have a go at using a IIIF resource to undertake some automated analysis.

Using a IIIF Illustration Detector.

  1. Enter this manifest: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk//iiif/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098
  2. Click ‘Load Manifest’.
  3. Set the ‘Confidence Threshold’ to 85%.
  4. Tick ‘Show only illustrated pages’, and Click ‘Classify’.
  5. Once it’s finished, click ‘View All Pages’ and you will be able to look through just the pages with illustrations on. Handy!

Let’s try that again with a different resource…

This time, enter this manifest: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk//iiif/MS-OR-00770

What do you notice?

Why do you think this is?

Add the two manifests to you journal and include your answers.

This exercise used an easy to use tool, but you can apply all sorts of AI models to do different things - even transcribe handwriting! There’s a tool for that: Transkribus.

But to really get into AI models, you might be better off learning to code using Python/R.