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.

在旧书的封面之间隐藏着一份关于世界及其居民的非凡的视觉记录。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。插图讲述了那些跨越时间和空间创造和阅读它们的人的想法和信仰。它们也是实物，在全球流通，形成了跨国世界观，既有共同的世界观，也有争议的世界观。这些图像赋予了自然和建筑环境新的意义，并在他们对本地和外国，旅行者，土著，殖民地和流离失所者的描述中，展现了人与地方之间复杂的交叉点。插图对文化机构尤其重要，因为它们通常在地点和社区投入大量资金。地点的概念错综复杂地交织在收藏的语境中，以及机构定义自己、体验和参与的方式中。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的插图收藏，并且可以在网上访问。有几个因素导致了这种忽视：人们对插图的重要性认识有限，特别是因为许多插图已经消失了很长时间，被视为独特艺术对象的次要因素；数字化插图的规模和种类之多，使得找到相关图像并将它们放在一起进行分析变得具有挑战性。简而言之，即使找到了插图，也很难确定哪些插图“在那里”，以及可以用它们做什么。在插图书数字化之前，理论家格姆拉德·吉内特决定反对对插图进行研究，因为这个领域是一个“广阔的大陆”。该项目旨在探索这片“广阔的大陆”，将英国和美国文化机构的插图、博物馆研究和计算机科学方面的学者聚集在一起，这些文化机构有不同的要求、受众和收藏：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。策展人提出的研究问题塑造了数字方法的发展，这将揭示一个被遗忘的图像世界，揭示被边缘化的历史。计算工具（如众包标签、字幕捕获、地质解析）将用于从大英图书馆的核心数字化图画书馆藏中识别出重要的地点和人物图书插图子集，从而丰富其可搜索性和相关性。为了回应文化机构的研究问题，这些插图将被放置在相互对话中，并与收藏中的其他图像和物体对话，挑战传统的分类，使隐藏的历史得以揭示。在这种情况下很少使用的计算机视觉将允许我们询问图像的相似性和差异，有效地绘制视觉“刻板印象”的构建，转换和颠覆（这个术语本身与插图印刷有关）。我们将第一次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亲缘关系和差异，这种比较分析在书的物质形式中是不可能的。在这个项目中发现的历史本身和用于揭示它们的数字方法都很重要。我们的目标是创造一个环境和基础设施遗产，这将产生对理解插图的数字方法的要求和可能性的更深入的了解，并在文化机构中为这些图像找到一个位置。