‘Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of Printed Books from the Nineteenth Century’‘, led by Professor Julia Thomas in the School of English, Communication & Philosophy, Cardiff University, is one of 21 new research projects, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to address the challenges of working with big data and making the information more accessible and easier to interpret by a lay audience. Lost Visions builds on pioneering work on illustration studies and digital humanities, undertaken previously in the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research (CEIR), particularly the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration.

In collaboration with experts at Cardiff’s School of Computer Sciences & Informatics, Professor Thomas will work on more than a million illustrations from books in the British Library’s collection. Although many historical texts have been digitally stored, the illustrations in these texts are frequently without the information needed to help people understand them. The Cardiff team will devise methods that will enable the collection of illustrations to become fully searchable online.

Visit the archive at  http://illustrationarchive.cf.ac.uk/