Digital History seminar 10 March 2015 Julia Thomas, Nicky Lloyd and Ian Harvey (Cardiff) Despite the mass digitization of books, illustrations have remained more or less invisible. As an aesthetic form, illustration is conventionally positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy that places painting and sculpture at the top. The hybridity or bimediality of illustration is also problematic, the genre having fallen between the cracks of literary studies and art history. In a digital context, illustration has fared no better: new technologies can aid the editing of a literary text far more successfully than they can deal with the images that accompany it. This paper focuses on the challenges and the implications of an AHRC-funded Big Data project that will make searchable online over a million book illustrations from the British Library’s collections. The images span the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, cover a variety of reproductive techniques (including etching, wood engraving, lithography and photography), and are taken from around 68,000 works of literature, history, geography and philosophy. The paper identifies issues relating to the improvement of bibliographic metadata and the analysis of the iconographic features of the images, which impact on our understanding of ‘the image’ in Digital Humanities and the negotiation of Big Data more generally. The work undertaken as part of the Lost Visions project allows for the further development of Illustration Studies, repositioning visual culture in the largely text-based process of digitisation and problematising modes of textual production.

1. Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of
Printed Books from the Nineteenth Century

2. British Library
Over 65,000 volumes of literature, philosophy,
history and geography
C. 1528 - 1946
1 million illustrations

3. Advertisements
William Paterson, [Paterson’s
Guide to Edinburgh.]
(Edinburgh, 1833), p. 90.
Alexandre Dumas, Monte Cristo and
his Wife. A companion story to “The
Count of Monte Cristo” (London,
1891), p. 273.

4. Topographical
Daniel Lysons, Magna Britannia;
being a concise topographical
account of the several counties
of Great Britain. [With copious
illustrations.], 6 vols (London,
1806), I, 593
Ferdinand Christian Hochstetter, New
Zealand, its physical geography,
geology and natural history, with
special reference to the results of
Government Expeditions in the
provinces of Auckland and Nelson
(Stuttgart, 1867), p. 529.

5. Literary Illustration
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn,
the Irish Member. With twenty
illustrations by J. E. Millais (London,
1869), II, 66.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London:
1897), p. 763.

6. Decorations
Francis Thompson, [Songs
wing-to-wing: an offering to two
sisters... Printed for private
circulation.] (Boston, 1895), p. 9.
Francis William Cross, [Rambles
round Old Canterbury ... With
illustrations.], 3rd edn (London, 1884),
p. 45.

7. Title Pages
Jane Isabella Stuart, A Ghost’s
Philosophy (London; Aberdeen,
1889), p. 7.
G. A. Colmache, An Undiscovered
Crime: The Story of a Guilty Secret,
3rd edn (London; New York, 1888), p.
7.

8. Maps
William Turner, The Port of
Cardiff. [With map.] (Cardiff, 1882),
p. 102.
Anon., The Illustrated Hand-Book to
London and its environs. With [...]
engravings, two maps, etc. (London:
Ingram, Cooke & Co., 1853), p. 141.

9. Natural World
Anon., The Poetry of Birds,
selected from various authors; with
coloured illustrations. By a Lady.
(1833), p. 40.
Erasmus Darwin, The Poetical Works of
Erasmus Darwin ... Containing the
Botanic Garden ... and the Temple of
Nature. With philosophical notes and
plates, (London, 1806), II, 76.

10. Scientific
James Sowerby, British
Mineralogy: or coloured figures
intended to elucidate the
mineralogy of Great Britain
(London, 1804), II, 124.
Caleb Pamely, The Colliery
Manager's Handbook ... Fourth
edition, revised and enlarged
(London, 1898), p. 145.

11. Travel/Ethnographic
Verney Lovett Cameron,
[Across Africa, etc. [With a map
and plates.]] (London, 1885), p.
164.
Anon., Tashrih al-aqvam, an account
of origins and occupations of some of
the sects, castes and tribes of India
(n. p.)

12. Reproductive Techniques

13. Etchings
John T. Reid, Pictures from the Orkney
Islands (etched ... in pen and ink). [With
descriptive letterpress.] (Edinburgh,
1881), p. 197.
Richard Dagley, [Death's Doings;
consisting of numerous original
compositions, in prose and verse …
principally intended as illustrations of
twenty-four plates designed and etched
by R. Dagley.] (London, 1827), p. 326.

14. Lithographs
Edward Tuite Dalton, Descriptive
Ethnology of Bengal. By Edward
Tuite Dalton. Illustrated by lithograph
portraits copied from photographs
(Calcutta, 1872), p. 497.
Charles Richard Weld, Two months in
the Highlands, Orcadia, and Skye. [With
coloured lithographed views.] (London,
1860), p. 10.

15. Wood Engravings
Jean Ingelow, Poems ... With
illustrations by G. J. Pinwell, E. J.
Poynter, ... engraved by the
Brothers Dalziel (London, 1867), p.
229.
George du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson.
[A novel] ... Edited [or rather written]
and illustrated by G. du Maurier
(London, 1892), II, 132.

16. Photographs
Mary Benham, A Guide to
Colchester and its Environs; with
notes on the flora and entomology of
the district (Colchester, 1874), p. 58.
William Kinninmond Burton, Ayame-
San. A Japanese romance of the 23rd
year of Meiji (1890) ... Illustrated from
photographs by W. K. Burton
(Yokohama, 1892), p. 300.

17. Aquatints
Brian Broughton, [Four Picturesque
Views in North Wales, engraved in
aquatinta by Alken, from drawings
made on the spot, by the Rev. B.
Broughton ... With poetical
reflections on leaving that country.]
(London, 1801), p. 28.
William Combe, An history of the
principal rivers of Great Britain
(London, 1794; 1796), facing 264.

18. Reproductive Techniques

19. Creating the Illustration Archive

20. The Illustration Archive Audience
An attempt to create a research and discovery tool for anyone
Who?
• Researchers:
– Different types of researchers...
– with differing areas of expertise and backgrounds...
– who research in different ways...
• Members of the public
– Same issues as above
So lots of feedback was sought to enable different people to work as they do
best.

21. Big Data
• There’s lots of it
• You often don’t know what’s in there
• It’s arriving faster than you can deal with it
• Storing it is expensive
• Processing it is hard
• Moving it is difficult
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway.”
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Computer Networks, 4th ed., p. 91

22. The Starting Point
A massive number of images
Slightly unreliable metadata
No Illustrators listed
No knowledge of what is in the illustrations
No real knowledge of context for each illustration
No way to search beyond bibliographic metadata

23. British Library Metadata
• There’s lots of it
• You often don’t know what’s in there
But it is a decent starting point!

25. So, we don’t really know what we have...
… How do we find that out?

26. Tagging - Crowdsourcing
Much discussion about how we should do this:
What do we ask?
How do we structure the questions?
Objects, feelings, emotions, personalities, locations
But we don’t want to overly structure the questions and risk missing some interesting information
Tagging, “Categories”, Captions, Descriptions.

27. Tagging

28. Machine Learning
The only realistic way to tackle 1,000,000 images
Looking for similarities between images
May be things we (as humans) don’t immediately consider
Requires large amounts of compute resources and relies on “state of the art” techniques in object
recognition and image processing
Main objective is to work alongside the crowd sourced information and
create a positive feedback loop within our system.

29. Machine Learning Workflow
Crowdsourcing Workflow
Database
Presentation QuestionsCatagorize Highlight Record
Catagorize OCR
Facial
Recognition Features Record
External
Drive
Data Import

30. Searching
Strict Bibliographic Metadata search
• Author
• Title
• Publisher
Search by Decade - more vague way to see illustrations by “era”
Search by Illustrator - derived information
Search “keywords”
Search visually
Provide prompts from the system to consider other images

31. Types of Searching
Bibliographic Metadata gets us part the way there.
We want to know what is actually in an image, the history, or the stories around it.
Once we find an image we like, we probably want to find more like it.
Sometimes we can be very specific in our searches…
… but sometimes we just want to discover in a more vague or serendipitous way
We’ve tried to provide a number of searching features which allow for each of these use cases

32. The Search Tools
Keyword search
“Advanced Search”
Different views on search results
“Random” searches
Prompts from discovered Illustrations
• Similar Images
• Images in this Book
• Machine Vision suggestions

33. Finding “Similar Images”

34. Advanced Search Options

35. Results Viewing Options - Gallery

37. Results Viewing Options - List

38. Random / Serendipity

39. The Collaborative Tools
Users can build their own custom collections of illustrations
Captions can be added
These can be presented as an “Exhibition”
Moderated Exhibitions can be shared and presented on the website
Download features
“Share” collections on Twitter, other social media sites

40. User Created Collections

41. Public and Private Exhibition Pages

42. Research Applications

46. Une Culotte; or, a New Woman. An
impossible story of modern Oxford. By
Tivoli ... Illustrated, etc. (London, 1894)
H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance. A
holiday adventure, etc (London, 1896),
p. 182.

47. Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood
Robin Hood; a collection of all the ancient poems, songs, and ballads now extant
relative to that ... outlaw. To which are prefixed historical anecdotes of his life. Edited
by J. Ritson. With wood engravings by Thomas Bewick. 1795, p. 342.

48. Robin Hood: a collection of poems, songs, and ballads ... Edited by Joseph
Ritson (London, 1884), p. 202.

51. The Indian Mutiny (1857)

52. EWA: the Ethno-ornithology World
Archive

53. (1) George Graves, British
Ornithology; being the history,
with a coloured representation
of every known species of
British birds (London, 1811), p.
100
(2) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The
Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Edited by William B.
Scott (London, 1894), p. 44.
(3) Owl mobbed by smaller
birds, Image taken from
Bestiary, Originally
published/produced in England
(Salisbury?); 1230-1240.
(4) Henry Whitney Bellows, The Old World in its New Face. Impressions of Europe in 1867-1868 (New
York, 1868), I, 169.

54. Poetry of Birds
Anon., The Poetry of Birds, selected from various authors; with coloured
illustrations. By a Lady (Liverpool: George Smith, 1833), pp. 36-37.

55. Walter Scott and Scotland

56. Anon., Scott and Scotland: or, historical and romantic
Illustrations of Scottish Story ... With ... steel engravings
(London: Stevens, 1845), p. 205.
James Skene, A Series of Sketches of the existing
localities alluded to in the Waverley Novels. Etched from
original drawings by J. Skene (Edinburgh, 1829). p. 300.
Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Modern Athens, displayed in a series of
views; or, Edinburgh in the nineteenth century; exhibiting the whole of
the new buildings, modern improvements, antiquities, & picturesque
scenery of the Scottish metropolis & its environs, from original drawings
by Mr. T. H. Shepherd. With historical, topographical & critical
illustrations [by John Britton] (London, 1829), p. 232.
Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1887), p. 119.

57. William Henry
Davenport Adams,
Romantic Stories of
Our Scottish Towns
(Glasgow: Morrison,
1894), p. 7.

58. http://illustrationarchive.cf.ac.uk/
Lost Visions (@Lost_Visions)
http://lostvisions.weebly.com