Lost Visions: retrieving the visual element of printed books from the nineteenth century

Ours is an age when images proliferate at unprecedented speed thanks to digital technology. So it is ironic that our past visual culture is seriously threatened by the very same technical advances. Many verbal texts are now stored and delivered by machine, and digital search techniques help us understand the meaning, provenance and reception of these texts. However, for reasons of economy or of complex IPR issues, the illustrations in these texts are frequently omitted. When included, they are often of low quality and without the metadata which are needed for understanding them. While their market value hardly suffers because of these shortcomings, their use as sources of aesthetic, literary and historical information is seriously compromised. There is a risk that tomorrow's readers will be almost unaware of illustration, even though research has shown that illustrated texts have qualities, meanings and strategies which are very different from those of texts that are not illustrated, and even strikingly different from those of the same verbal texts stripped of their images. Whole genres of artistic, educational and informative products may effectively be lost to us.

A unique opportunity to start addressing this issue is provided by a dataset held by the British Library. This dataset consists of 68,000 digitised volumes (approx. 25 million pages) covering 'Literature', 'Philosophy', 'General History' and 'Geography' from the Long Nineteenth Century, a period that is arguably the most important in British book illustration. In these years, 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.

The pages in the dataset are scanned at high resolution and OCR'd and the presence of non-verbal objects found in them is noted. We will use computational methods to identify the visual characteristics of these non-verbal objects (i.e. whether they partake of the nature of maps, diagrams, tables, graphs, significant typographic layout etc.). We aim to add to the available metadata by giving full bibliographical details of the book, the exact location and size of the image, and, where possible, a caption or title, and an artist. In addition, we will develop tools for identifying the re-use of images (in the form of reproductions, re-drawings, recuttings and transmediations). The result will be a web-based interface that provides searchable access to a database of images with accompanying metadata. As such, this project will rescue large numbers of images which would otherwise to all intents and purposes be lost. While the size of the grant does not allow for a full analysis of the subject matter of these illustrations, we shall trial crowd-sourcing methods for assigning tags. We are currently in discussion with a data management SME on how collaboration could increase the effectiveness and decrease the unit cost of semantic tagging on a large scale.

This is a project big in itself, but far bigger in its eventual impact. 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.

To deal with issues which arise during the project and to implement an impact strategy which will be felt well beyond it, we have set up a substantial panel of collaborators and external advisers who have expertise in the project itself and both expertise and influence in the world of potential users.

The aim of 'Lost Visions', as the title suggests, is to make thousands of neglected images more widely visible. A database of this size and breadth will have a multitude of potential users. However, we shall work to target the following main constituencies:

Librarians: such a large data source will be of interest to libraries in general because of new information about publication and publishing history. Through reference librarians, we can reach members of the public such as those studying aspects of local history, family history and the origins of the modern industrialised world.

General public: the appeal of the database lies in the fact that, as well as making many hitherto neglected images and artists visible to the public eye, it includes some of the 'greats' of the period, including John Everett Millais and Frederic Leighton, and major foreign illustrators such as Retzsch, Gavarni and Gustave Doré.

Education: during workshops for school teachers and pupils held as part of the AHRC-funded DEDEFI project, we identified a need for more historical digital image sources, which this project will provide.

Picture researchers: a large number of images from this period are used on factual television and news and current affairs programmes. The availability of so many images from one source will be of enormous benefit to picture researchers.

Trainers of picture researchers e.g. University of Plymouth, Oxford Brookes University, the London College of Communication, the London School of Publishing, Picture Research Courses Online.

Employers of picture researchers: the numerous requests from media companies, publishers and advertising agencies for images contained in the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (DMVI) suggests that there will be significant demand for images from this much larger database.

Creative artists, including illustrators and graphic designers: this constituency has shown considerable interest in the wood-engraved images in DMVI. This interest will be intensified in a database that encompasses a variety of reproductive techniques and artistic styles. In terms of design and reproductive techniques, the period covered by the dataset is, arguably, the most significant in British book illustration. A period of rapid technological development saw the rise and fall of etching, wood engraving and photomechanical techniques. This collection of illustrations is, in itself, a history of nineteenth-century design that will be of interest to graphic designers and those working in related fields.

Book collectors and sellers will profit from the added metadata attached to the volumes

Commercial: the project will provide a variety of analytic techniques which are in some degree portable across domains, and, in particular, will provide models of hardware architecture to those carrying out large-scale comparison of images. We are planning a Knowledge Transfer Project with Capture, an SME in digital data management.

Third Sector: the National Art Library Collections, the Department of Word and Image at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Wellcome Library, the House of Illustration. We shall also target holders of specialist image collections, such as Collage (Guildhall Art Gallery and London Metropolitan Archives), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MA, USA), and the Ashmolean Museum, whose collections will be complemented by our database.