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.

隐藏在旧书封面之间的是世界及其居民的非凡视觉记录，书籍插图跨越了几个世纪，代表了从威尔士到怀俄明州的各个地方。插图讲述了跨越时空的创作者和阅读者的想法和信仰。它们也是物质性的物体，在全球范围内循环利用，并有助于形成跨国的世界观，这些图像既具有共享性又具有争议性，为自然和建筑环境赋予了新的意义，并在代表本地和外国时突出了人与地方之间的复杂交集。这插图对于文化机构尤其重要，这些机构通常在地点和社区上投入巨资。地方的概念与藏品的背景以及机构定义自身和存在的方式错综复杂地交织在一起。然而，历史书籍插图很少在文化机构中使用或分析，尽管图书馆中存在数字化插图集并且可以在线访问，但造成这种忽视的几个因素是：人们对插图的重要性认识有限，尤其是。正如许多人一样长期以来，它们被视为次要的独特艺术作品；而数字化插图的规模和多样性使得寻找相关图像并相互分析变得非常困难。简而言之，很难识别它们。在插图书籍数字化之前，理论家热拉尔·热内特 (Gérard Genette) 决定反对对插图进行研究，因为该领域是一个“巨大的大陆”。是这个该项目旨在通过汇集具有不同需求、受众和收藏的英国和美国文化机构中插画、博物馆研究和计算机科学领域的学者来探索“巨大的大陆”：特别收藏和档案馆、卡迪夫大学、美国遗产中心、怀俄明大学、西部布法罗比尔中心、兰贝斯宫图书馆和国家信托基金会的合作模式为我们的实践提供了信息，策展人提出的研究问题塑造了数字方法的发展，这些方法将揭示一个被遗忘的图像和世界。揭开历史。计算工具（例如众包标签、标题捕获、地理解析）将用于从大英图书馆的核心数字化插图书籍中识别地点和人物的书籍插图的重要子集，从而丰富其可搜索性和相关性。为了解决文化机构的研究问题，这些插图将相互对话，并与收藏中的其他图像和物体进行对话，挑战分类并使很少使用的传统隐藏历史得以揭示。在此背景下，我们将能够探究图像学的相似性和差异，有效地描绘视觉“刻板印象”（这个术语本身与插图印刷有关）的构建、转变和颠覆。能够识别建筑物或景观插图的变化，或者追踪人物表现形式之间的相似性和差异，这种比较分析在书籍的物质形式中是不可能的。这个项目揭示的历史本身和数字方法都很重要我们的目标是创造一个环境和基础设施遗产，使人们更深入地了解理解插图的数字方法的要求和可能性，并在文化机构中为这些图像找到一席之地。