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.
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.
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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