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

Abstract: 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.