Finding a place: advancing digital methods to unlock the use of digitized book illustrations in cultural institutions

找到一个地方：推进数字方法以解锁数字化图书插图在文化机构中的使用

• 批准号: AH/W005417/1
• 负责人: Julia Thomas
• 金额: $ 25.43万
• 依托单位: CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW005417%2F1
• 关键词: Finding; place; advancing; digital; methods

Hidden between the covers of old books lies a remarkable visual record of the world and its inhabitants. Book illustrations span centuries and represent everywhere from Wales to Wyoming. Illustrations tell stories about the ideas and beliefs of those who created and read them across time and space. They are also material objects, which circulated around the globe and contributed to transnational world views, both shared and contested. These images give new meanings to natural and built environments and foreground complex intersections between people and place in their depiction of the local and foreign, the traveller, the indigenous, colonized, and displaced. Illustrations are especially significant for cultural institutions, which are often heavily invested in locations and communities. A notion of place is intricately interwoven in the contextualization of collections and the ways in which institutions define themselves and are experienced and engaged with.Yet historical book illustrations are rarely used or analyzed in cultural institutions, even though digitized collections of illustrations exist in libraries and are accessible online. Several factors underlie this neglect: there is a limited awareness of the importance of illustrations, especially as many have been out of sight for so long and viewed as secondary to unique artistic objects; and the sheer scale and variety of digitized illustrations makes it challenging to find relevant images and to analyze them alongside each other. To put it simply, it is difficult to identify what illustrations are 'out there' and what can be done with them even if they are found. Prior to the digitization of illustrated books, the theorist, Gérard Genette, decided against research into illustrations because the field was an 'immense continent'.It is this 'immense continent' that the project seeks to explore by bringing together scholars in illustration, museum studies, and computer science in UK and US cultural institutions with different requirements, audiences, and collections: Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University, the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Lambeth Palace Library, and the National Trust. A collaborative model informs our practice, with the research questions posed by curators moulding the development of digital methods that will reveal a forgotten world of images and uncover marginalized histories. Computational tools (e.g. crowdsourced tags, caption capture, geoparsing) will be used to identify a significant subset of book illustrations of places and people from a core digitized collection of illustrated books from the British Library, thus enriching its searchability and relevance. In response to the research questions of the cultural institutions, these illustrations will then be placed in dialogue with each other and with other images and objects in collections, challenging conventional categorizations and enabling hidden histories to be revealed. Computer vision, which has rarely been used in this context, will allow us to interrogate iconographic similarities and divergences, effectively charting the construction, transformation, and subversion of visual 'stereotypes' (a term that is itself bound up in the printing of illustrations). We will for the first time be able to identify changes in illustrations of buildings or landscapes, or trace affinities and differences across representations of people, a comparative analysis that is impossible in the material form of the book.The histories uncovered on this project are significant in themselves and in the digital methods used to reveal them. Our objective is to create an environment and infrastructural legacy that will generate a deeper knowledge of the requirements and possibilities of digital methods for understanding illustrations, and to find a place for these images within cultural institutions.

隐藏在旧书籍的封面之间是世界及其影响力的显着视觉记录。书插图跨越了几个世纪，从威尔士到怀俄明州各处代表。插图讲述了那些在跨时空创建和阅读的人的思想和信念的故事。它们也是物质物体，它们在全球范围内散发，并促进了跨国世界观，既有共享又有争议。这些图像为自然和建筑环境以及人们之间的自然环境和前景复杂的交集提供了新的含义，并将其描述为当地和外国，旅行者，土著，殖民和流离失所。插图对于通常在地点和社区投入大量投资的文化机构尤其重要。一个地方的概念在收藏的情境化以及机构定义自己并经验并与之互动的方式中复杂地交织在一起。年龄的插图很少在文化机构中使用或分析，即使图书馆中存在数字化的插图集合，并且可以在线访问。忽视这种忽视的几个因素：对插图的重要性的认识有限，尤其是许多因素，因为许多人已经看不见了这么长时间，被视为次要的独特艺术对象；纯粹的规模和多种数字化的插图使查找相关图像并相互分析的挑战是挑战。简而言之，很难确定哪些插图是“外面”，即使找到了什么插图，也可以用它们做什么。在数字化插图书籍之前，该理论是GérardGenette决定反对插图的研究，因为该领域是一个“巨大的继续”，这是该项目寻求通过在英国和众多群体中的众多群体和美国文化中心的学者和计算机上的学者和库存的学院进行插图，库存和库存的学者来探索的“巨大持续”。怀俄明州，西部布法罗比尔中心，兰贝斯宫图书馆和国家信托基金。一个协作模型为我们的实践提供了信息，策展人塑造了数字方法的开发所假定的研究问题，该方法将揭示一个被遗忘的图像世界和发现边缘化的历史。计算工具（例如，众包标签，字幕捕获，地理标签）将用于确定大量的书籍插图，从大英图书馆的核心数字化插图书籍中的地点和人员插图，从而丰富了其可搜索性和相关性。为了回答文化机构的研究问题，这些插图将与彼此之间的对话以及集合中的其他图像和对象进行对话，挑战传统类别，并使隐藏的历史揭示。在这种情况下很少使用的计算机视觉将使我们能够审问肖像相似性和差异，从而有效地绘制了视觉“刻板印象”的构建，转换和颠覆（该术语本身在插图的打印中绑定了）。我们将首次能够确定建筑物或景观的图表的变化，或者跨人表示的痕量亲和力以及差异，这是本书的物质形式不可能的比较分析。该项目中发现的历史本身和用于揭示它们的数字方法是重要的。我们的目标是创建一个环境和基础设施遗产，该遗产将更深入地了解理解插图的数字方法的要求和可能性，并在文化机构中找到这些图像的位置。