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The Illustration Archive Launches!

6/4/2015

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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.’

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‘Now as The Illustration Archive – the world’s biggest searchable archive of 
book illustrations - becomes free to the public, it has the potential to 
revolutionise how illustration is understood and the importance accorded to it, 
to supply an image-hungry commercial world with illustrative material, and 
to lead to ever more accurate ways of classifying and analysing images in 
large databases.’

Commenting on the project, illustrator Quentin Blake said: ‘The printed 
pages of the 19th century are full of remarkable images, if we can find them. The Illustration Archive puts a million of them within reach. Amazing.’

We would like to thank everybody who attended the launch event and for all those who have contributed to the Lost Visions project over the last year. We very much hope that you will enjoy using the site! 

Links to media and blog coverage of the launch are available below:
Wales Online 
AHRC 
Cardiff University 
Capture blog 
Piece of Pinkie blog
Design Wales Forum blog

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Consultation Workshop 4: Libraries and the Illustration Archive

20/3/2015

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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.

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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.

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Lost Visions at the IHR Digital History Seminar

17/3/2015

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Last week Julia Thomas, Ian Harvey and Nicky Lloyd presented on 'Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of Printed Books' at the Institute of Historical Research Digital History Seminar in London. 

The YouTube video of the presentation can be viewed below. Further details, including the PowerPoint slide show, can be found on the Digital History Blog. The podcast is available at http://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/digital-history/lost-visions-retrieving-visual-element-printed-books
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Mario Klingemann and ‘The Joy of Order’

2/2/2015

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Last week we hosted a visit from Mario Kilngemann. An artist, freelance, creative coder and practitioner of ‘computational craft’, Mario has been doing some fascinating work with the images in the collection, creating a set of reimagined images.


Based on the initial manual creation of image training sets, Mario has used the data clustering algorithm DBSCAN to locate similar images with remarkable results.  The image sets that he has generated - which range from ‘sad-looking women’ to horses to decorative motifs to ‘forty four gentlemen who look like forty four’  – not only offer fascinating new insights into the content of the collection, but the sorting of clustering of images has significant implications in terms of being able to identify re-cut and re-used illustrations.

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Mario’s work also has considerable potential in terms of measuring the texture and saturation of images in order to distinguish between reproductive techniques and using image segmentation in order to locate similarities between images.

After a productive day of finding out about Mario’s work and exchanging ideas, we enjoyed dinner and some drinks in an ‘authentic’ Cardiff pub.  We very much hope to collaborate with Mario in future and were delighted to have had the chance to find out more about his work.

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For more of Mario’s work, see: 


http://incubator.quasimondo.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/
Twitter: @quasimondo

                                         
                                                   

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Lost Visions at the British Library Labs 'Curious Images' Event

5/1/2015

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Last month, our software developer Ian Harvey spoke at the British Library Labs 'Curious Images' event in London. The event coincided with the one year anniversary of the release of the British Library's million images onto Flickr Commons and focused on how researchers and artists have used the images, in order to share ideas, techniques, methods and insights.

As part of the event Ian presented on 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. He demonstrated the Illustration Archive's crowd-sourced tagging process and offered an overview of the successes and challenges of the use of machine vision algorithms.

Ian's presentation is available in the YouTube video below. Other presentations from the 'Curious Images' event can be accessed at  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpFHCxky-e5ENeUU5KtdyOA
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Consultation Workshop 3: Illustration Studies and the Digital Archive

13/11/2014

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On the 4th November we hosted a workshop where we demonstrated the Illustration Archive to academics working in various aspects of illustration studies. In attendance were delegates from Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff University, Liverpool John Moores University, Roehampton University, Ryerson University (Toronto) and the University of Sussex.

The workshop began with an introduction from Professor Julia Thomas and Ian Harvey, which was followed by a presentation of case studies and research applications that have arisen from the project to date. Material from the Lost Visions dataset has informed the research of staff in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff working on topics ranging from the Robin Hood tradition to Walter Scott and travel writing to the Indian Mutiny. Illustrations from the archive have also shaped the development and content of two digital archives currently under construction: ‘Women in Trousers: A Visual Archive’ and ‘The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive’. In terms of the wider engagement of the project, we discussed the creation of teacher resources and curated collections linking to other websites.

This was followed by a discussion of design implementation challenges, in which Ian Harvey drew attention to the problems of working with ‘Big Data’, the improvement of existing metadata, designing search features, human crowdsourcing and machine learning.

The second half of the workshop included a demonstration of the site and an interactive session where delegates were able to trial the searching and tagging elements of the archive. Feedback from this session was wide-ranging, raising general issues relating to the site interface, navigation and searching and more specific issues about tagging and searching from an illustration studies perspective.

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The final roundtable discussion broadened the focus and raised some valuable points about the wider significance of the Illustration Archive. The development process draws attention to some of the conflicts that arise in the text-based digitisation process and, most significantly, to the lack of a suitable lexicon for classification of illustration.  The Lost Visions project is focused on retrieving and re-establishing the visual element of the printed book; in doing so, it must seek to expose and problematise the privileging of the text in terms of the author.

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Lost Visions at the Digital Humanities Congress 2014, University of Sheffield

4/9/2014

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Members of the Lost Visions team will be speaking at the DHC 2014, University of Sheffield. We will be presenting on Friday 5th September as part of a panel with colleagues from Cardiff University on 'Re-Imagining Nineteenth Century Books' : http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/dhc/session/19

Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of Printed Books From the Nineteenth Century 
Cardiff University: Julia Thomas, Nicky Lloyd and Ian Harvey.

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 bi-mediality 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 the following issues, which impact on our understanding of ‘the image’ in Digital Humanities and the negotiation of Big Data more generally:

1. Adding to bibliographic metadata
Although the images are accompanied by the BL catalogue entry, this information is not always complete. Moreover, data from the title (e.g. the name of the illustrator/engraver) needs to be identified in order to make the archive searchable using these terms. We will discuss the algorithms that we have used to add to this metadata.

2. Analysing the iconographic features of the images
This is a particular challenge because of the sheer number of images in the dataset. Our approach combines image recognition software, crowdsourced tagging and machine learning.

3. New research questions
We will outline the ways in which this searchable illustration archive will offer new ways of ‘reading’ images, allowing for the further development of Illustration Studies.

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Lost Visions: A Computational Overview

29/7/2014

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The "Lost Visions" project is creating an internet-based system for enabling users to interact with digitized content in a variety of different ways. A key objective is to allow digitized content to be searchable using crowd sourced, bibliographic and content-based features. These features are captured as keywords, either based on text provided by a user (as part of a crowdsourcing activity), keywords extracted from key positions in the bibliographic data (e.g. name of illustrator, engraver, photographer, book title etc.), or those obtained by the outcome of an image-processing algorithm. A website has been implemented for the project which links into a high performance computing environment at Cardiff University to support image storage and processing.

A key novelty of this project is the combined use of these features to facilitate search.

The system enables users:

(i)                  to view and interact with digitized images;

(ii)                to tag images using keywords or to make use of a pre-defined taxonomy;

(iii)               to add images of interest into a "personal" archive. This archive does not allow images to be downloaded, but primarily to be recorded into a "personal space" on the web site;

It also enables comparison between images to be carried out using image-processing algorithms. These algorithms originate from work in content-based image retrieval, enabling full-image features to be recorded and compared across images. A "geo" element has also been included in the project, which enables search to be carried out based on a geographic bounding box, or text search for place-names via a gazetteer.

The current prototype has been implemented using PostgreSQL (with the PostGIS add on). The user interface is implemented in PyCharm (Python).

Various image processing libraries have been investigated to discover what data can be retrieved from images in order to compare and sort images automatically. So far, a "Bag of Words" method of processing the SIFT descriptors of images. This is using code found at:
https://github.com/shackenberg/Minimal-Bag-of-Visual-Words-Image-Classifier
and modified to perform a random selection from a selection of training images, and produce a confusion matrix based on its success. The SIFT descriptors only need to be calculated once, and can be stored in a separate file per image. Subsequently, K-means histograms are calculated, and these are also saved to disk for reuse.

A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is then trained and is also saved to a file.  However this training needs to be performed every time the training set changes, and this is the most processor intensive (and so time consuming) action by far. Additionally, as the SVM is categorizing images based on their "closeness" to a point on a multi-dimensional plane, a threshold will be placed on how far from this point is acceptable. This distance can be considered as a "confidence" value, and will be an indicator as to which images should be further analysed, either via crowdsourcing or with different descriptor processors.

Current work on the image analysis has not yet made full use of our high-end computing capability: this is expected to be the next step in our implementation.
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Consultation Workshop II: Big Data and the Digital Humanities

11/7/2014

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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.


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Consultation Workshop I: Illustration and Teaching

10/7/2014

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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.


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