Lost Visions: retrieving the visual element of printed books from the nineteenth century

失去的视野：找回十九世纪印刷书籍的视觉元素

• 批准号: AH/L010194/1
• 负责人: Julia Thomas
• 金额: $ 44.85万
• 依托单位: CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2014 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FL010194%2F1
• 关键词: Lost; Visions; retrieving; visual; element

Ours is an age when images proliferate at unprecedented speed thanks to digital technology. So it is ironic that our past visual culture is seriously threatened by the very same technical advances. Many verbal texts are now stored and delivered by machine, and digital search techniques help us understand the meaning, provenance and reception of these texts. However, for reasons of economy or of complex IPR issues, the illustrations in these texts are frequently omitted. When included, they are often of low quality and without the metadata which are needed for understanding them. While their market value hardly suffers because of these shortcomings, their use as sources of aesthetic, literary and historical information is seriously compromised. There is a risk that tomorrow's readers will be almost unaware of illustration, even though research has shown that illustrated texts have qualities, meanings and strategies which are very different from those of texts that are not illustrated, and even strikingly different from those of the same verbal texts stripped of their images. Whole genres of artistic, educational and informative products may effectively be lost to us.A unique opportunity to start addressing this issue is provided by a dataset held by the British Library. This dataset consists of 68,000 digitised volumes (approx. 25 million pages) covering 'Literature', 'Philosophy', 'General History' and 'Geography' from the Long Nineteenth Century, a period that is arguably the most important in British book illustration. In these years, rapid changes in reproductive techniques were paralleled by changes in the meanings of art and its reception. Art was democratised and book illustrations became more widely collectable and mobile than ever before. The pages in the dataset are scanned at high resolution and OCR'd and the presence of non-verbal objects found in them is noted. We will use computational methods to identify the visual characteristics of these non-verbal objects (i.e. whether they partake of the nature of maps, diagrams, tables, graphs, significant typographic layout etc.). We aim to add to the available metadata by giving full bibliographical details of the book, the exact location and size of the image, and, where possible, a caption or title, and an artist. In addition, we will develop tools for identifying the re-use of images (in the form of reproductions, re-drawings, recuttings and transmediations). The result will be a web-based interface that provides searchable access to a database of images with accompanying metadata. As such, this project will rescue large numbers of images which would otherwise to all intents and purposes be lost. While the size of the grant does not allow for a full analysis of the subject matter of these illustrations, we shall trial crowd-sourcing methods for assigning tags. We are currently in discussion with a data management SME on how collaboration could increase the effectiveness and decrease the unit cost of semantic tagging on a large scale. This is a project big in itself, but far bigger in its eventual impact. It has the potential to revolutionise how illustration is understood and the importance accorded to it, to supply an image-hungry commercial world with illustrative material, and to lead to ever more accurate ways of classifying and analysing images in large databases.To deal with issues which arise during the project and to implement an impact strategy which will be felt well beyond it, we have set up a substantial panel of collaborators and external advisers who have expertise in the project itself and both expertise and influence in the world of potential users.

由于数字技术，我们所处的时代是图像以前所未有的速度激增的时代。因此，具有讽刺意味的是，我们过去的视觉文化受到同样的技术进步的严重威胁。现在，许多口头文本都是由机器存储和传递的，数字搜索技术可以帮助我们理解这些文本的含义、出处和接受情况。然而，出于经济原因或复杂的知识产权问题，这些文本中的插图经常被省略。当包含在内时，它们通常质量较低，并且没有理解它们所需的元数据。虽然它们的市场价值几乎不会因为这些缺点而受到影响，但它们作为美学、文学和历史信息来源的用途却受到严重损害。尽管研究表明，插图文本的品质、含义和策略与未插图的文本有很大不同，甚至与相同文本的文本有显着不同，但明天的读者仍然有可能几乎不知道插图。口头文本被剥夺了图像。我们可能实际上会失去所有类型的艺术、教育和信息产品。大英图书馆持有的数据集提供了开始解决这一问题的独特机会。该数据集包含 68,000 册数字化书籍（约 2500 万页），涵盖漫长的 19 世纪的“文学”、“哲学”、“通史”和“地理”，这一时期可以说是英国书籍插图中最重要的时期。这些年来，复制技术的快速变化与艺术的含义及其接受方式的变化并行。艺术变得民主化，书籍插图比以往任何时候都更具有收藏价值和流动性。数据集中的页面以高分辨率扫描并进行 OCR 处理，并记录其中发现的非语言对象的存在。我们将使用计算方法来识别这些非语言对象的视觉特征（即它们是否具有地图、图表、表格、图形、重要印刷布局等的性质）。我们的目标是通过提供书籍的完整书目详细信息、图像的确切位置和大小以及（如果可能）说明或标题以及艺术家来添加可用的元数据。此外，我们将开发用于识别图像重复使用的工具（以复制品、重新绘图、重新剪辑和转换的形式）。结果将是一个基于网络的界面，提供对带有元数据的图像数据库的可搜索访问。因此，该项目将挽救大量图像，否则这些图像将完全丢失。虽然拨款规模不足以对这些插图的主题进行全面分析，但我们将尝试使用众包方法来分配标签。我们目前正在与一家数据管理中小企业讨论如何通过协作来大规模提高语义标记的有效性并降低单位成本。这是一个本身很大的项目，但其最终影响要大得多。它有可能彻底改变插图的理解方式和赋予它的重要性，为渴望图像的商业世界提供插图材料，并带来在大型数据库中分类和分析图像的更准确的方法。为了在项目期间出现这些问题，并实施一项影响深远的战略，我们成立了一个由合作者和外部顾问组成的重要小组，他们不仅拥有项目本身的专业知识，而且在潜在用户的世界中拥有专业知识和影响力。

项目成果

'Lost Visions: A Descriptive Metadata Crowdsourcing and Search Platform for Nineteenth-Century Book Illustrations'

“失去的愿景：十九世纪书籍插图的描述性元数据众包和搜索平台”

• 发表时间: 2015
• 作者: Lloyd; N
• 通讯作者: N

Lost Visions: An Interview with Julia Thomas

失去的视力：朱莉娅·托马斯访谈

• DOI: http://dx.10.16995/ntn.752
• 发表时间: 2015
• 期刊: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 作者: Wolf A

Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital

十九世纪的插图和数字

• DOI: http://dx.10.1007/978-3-319-58148-4
• 发表时间: 2017
• 作者: Thomas J