Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of Printed Books from the Nineteenth Century
Channel: British Library Labs
Date: 2015-04-27

Ian Harvey, Software Developer, Cardiff University
Although many historical texts have been digitally stored, the illustrations in these texts are frequently without the information needed to help people understand them. Despite the mass digitization of books, illustrations have remained more or less invisible: new technologies can aid the editing of a literary text far more successfully than they can deal with the images that accompany it. This AHRC-funded Big Data project 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 65,000 works of literature, history, geography and philosophy. The Cardiff team will devise methods that will enable the collection of illustrations to become fully searchable online.
Ian Harvey will present the current progress of the Lost Visions project, with focus on the design for a "positive feedback loop" between machine vision and crowd sourcing methods of data collection. A demonstration of the crowd-sourcing website and the successes and challenges of the use of machine vision algorithms will also be given.