Last week saw the official launch of the Illustration Archive: http://illustrationarchive.cardiff.ac.uk/ . In the wake of national media coverage of the project (with a little help from Twitter!), the team were joined by academics, librarians, creative industry experts and members of the public (among others) for a wine reception and demonstration of the site. Held in Cardiff University’s Viriamu Jones Gallery, attendees were able to trial the site on six 42-inch touch screens amidst a series of projections of illustrations from the archive.

On the cultural significance of the Illustration Archive, Professor of English Literature Julia Thomas - the Principal Investigator of the Lost Visions project - said ‘This labour of love by our small dedicated team incorporating experts in English Literature and Computer Science is not only giving life again to thousands of neglected images but also giving back our visual culture, which might otherwise have been lost to the public forever.’

Explaining the background to the project, Professor Thomas said: ‘We have focused on illustrations from books spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth century, a period that is arguably the most important in British book illustration. This was a time when rapid changes in reproductive techniques were paralleled by changes in the meanings of art and its reception. Art was democratised and book illustrations became more widely collectable and mobile than ever before. In the same spirit, our work advances this leap further into the modern digital age.’

This week we held our final consultation workshop for librarians. In attendance were delegates from various university library sites at Cardiff University and Cardiff Metropolitan University and from the Swansea Library Service and Cwmbran Library. 


The workshop began an overview of the Lost Visions project and a presentation on the research applications that have arisen from the project to date. This was followed by a discussion of design implementation challenges, which included the improvement of existing metadata and designing search features.

The interactive session that followed provided an opportunity for delegates to trial the Illustration Archive in advance of the upcoming launch. Feedback from this session was wide-ranging. Among the suggestions raised were making the full page view feature more prominent (below), emphasising the geo-tagging element of the archive, revising some of the terminology in the tagging section, allowing users to review their tags and improving the zoom feature.

The roundtable discussion at the end of the afternoon emphasised the value of the Illustration Archive in breaking down generic hierarchies and exposing hitherto undiscovered connections between different types of text. Delegates also discussed the potential for the archive to be incorporated into teaching and training activities relating to the use of online resources. It was felt that encouraging students to engage in the tagging process would emphasise their understanding of the interaction between word and image and offer a deeper and more sophisticated knowledge of the challenges associated with designing and using search tools within online archives.

The day provided some extremely fruitful discussion and we would like to thank delegates for their valuable input in the crucial final stages before the archive is launched.

On the 3rd July we hosted a workshop for members of the Lost Visions Advisory Panel. External delegates in attendance were Felicity Bazell (Capture), Giles Bergel (Oxford University), Abbie Ennock (Capture), Simon Mahony (University College London) and Mike Pidd (HRI, Sheffield University).

The workshop focused on the computational and technical aspects of the project, beginning with presentations from Omer Rana on ‘Big Data and the Digital Humanities’ and Paul Rosin on ‘Image Recognition’. Ian Harvey then gave a demonstration of the illustration archive, which was followed by questions and a stimulating roundtable session. Points of discussion included how we might enhance the existing metadata, recent developments in content-based image retrieval and the politics of keywording.   

It was agreed that the crowdsourcing aspect of the project has wide implications for both the computer sciences and the humanities. Crowdsourced data is highly significant within an anthropological context and can be more fully understood through the use of sentiment analysis algorithms. This data also has much to tell us about the interaction between word and image and how we must understand the illustrated text as a bimedial work of art.

There were a number of suggestions that we are planning to implement as the database develops, including allowing users to create their own image collections, tailoring images to taggers’ specific fields of interest and allowing tagging of multiple images at a time.

We ended the day with dinner at a local restaurant where the discussions continued over wine and Italian food. The workshop was both stimulating and productive and has given us a wealth of ideas to take forward for the next stage of the project.

Last week we held two consultation workshops to demonstrate the online database and to obtain feedback and advice on the future development of the archive.   

The first – which took place on 1st July – was attended by teachers from local secondary schools and FE colleges, with representatives from Cathays High School, Merthyr Tydfil College and St David’s Catholic College. Our focus in the workshop was the possible application of the image collection for teaching English literature, although the breadth of the dataset means that the images in the archive will be significant for a wide range of disciplines including history, art, geography and media studies.

The morning session consisted of a demonstration of the archive and its search functionality. The teachers offered us valuable input relating to the usability of the archive and how they might use the images in their own teaching. Suggestions ranged from using material to contextualise the study of Renaissance drama and First World War poetry to examining literary illustrations of fairy tales and Gothic fiction. The educational practitioners also saw considerable potential for using images within the creative writing element of their teaching, which is especially relevant in the FE sector with the new Creative Writing A Level.

After a hearty lunch, we moved on to the afternoon session on image tagging. After an interactive tagging session we had a discussion about how best to engage pupils in the tagging process. There were many valuable suggestions made about modifying the interface, improving links to social media and emphasising the gamificiation aspect which will be of considerable help to us as we move forward with the project.  It is clear that there are many mutual benefits to engaging pupils in this kind of technological community participation and there are some exciting possibilities for incorporating this within the Welsh Baccalaureate assessment. In the final roundtable discussion, the teachers offered advice about creating bespoke teaching resources and a discussion forum for teachers as part of the database.

The day provided us with a range of ideas about how to move forward with the Lost Visions project and convinced us that the images in the collection have vast possibility for incorporation within the existing curriculum and exciting potential to promote the study of illustration.