Century: A Dataset of Sensitive Historical Images

How do we measure the way multi-modal generative models, like GPT-4 andGemini, describe images of historical events and figures, whose legacies may benuanced, multifaceted, or contested? As a first step to addressing this challenge,we introduce Century – a novel dataset of sensitive historical images. This datasetconsists of 1,500 images from recent history, created through a novel automatedmethod combining knowledge graphs and language models, while being rooted inthe practices of museums and digital archives. We demonstrate through automatedand human evaluation that this method produces a set of images that depict eventsand figures that are diverse across topics and represents all regions of the world,with implications for the development of evaluations for historical contextualisationand socio-cultural understanding.