Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of

Printed Books from the Nineteenth Century

British Library

Over 65,000 volumes of literature, philosophy, history and geography

C. 1528 - 1946

1 million illustrations

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Reproductive Techniques

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reproductive Techniques

Creating the Illustration Archive

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.

Multiple Workshops and feedback sessions.

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

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

British Library Metadata

• There’s lots of it

• You often don’t know what’s in there

But it is a decent starting point!

So, we don’t really know what we have...

… How do we find that out?

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.

Tagging

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.

Machine Learning Workflow

Crowdsourcing Workflow

Database

Presentation QuestionsCatagorize Highlight Record

Catagorize OCRFacial

Recognition Features Record

External

Drive

Data Import

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

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

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

Finding “Similar Images”

Advanced Search Options

Results Viewing Options - Gallery

Results Viewing Options - List

Random / Serendipity

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

User Created Collections

Public and Private Exhibition Pages

Research Applications

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.

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.

Robin Hood: a collection of poems, songs, and ballads ... Edited by Joseph

Ritson (London, 1884), p. 202.

The Indian Mutiny (1857)

EWA: the Ethno-ornithology World

Archive

(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.

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.

Walter Scott and Scotland

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.

William Henry

Davenport Adams,

Romantic Stories of

Our Scottish Towns

(Glasgow: Morrison,

1894), p. 7.

http://illustrationarchive.cf.ac.uk/

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