Lecture
Scaling Up Book History: A Computational Investigation of 18th-Century Book Ornaments from Manual Catalogues to Automated Discovery
- Date
- Tuesday 14 October 2025
- Time
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- Online - Register below to receive the online link
Scaling Up Book History: A Computational Investigation of 18th-Century Book Ornaments from Manual Catalogues to Automated Discovery
Is it possible to trace the hidden connections between 18th-century publishers and printers through the ornamental images in their books? This talk focuses on finding duplicate and near-duplicate decorative images by deep learning across 200,000 digitized books from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Wooden and copper printing plates were expensive assets that were reused across multiple publications, creating visual fingerprints that can reveal collaboration networks in the publishing world. Using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques including object detection and self-supervised learning, we developed methods to automatically identify and group these historical ornaments—particularly headpieces and decorative initials. Our semi-supervised approach achieves 94% precision in clustering similar images, uncovering ten times more exemplars of previously studied ornaments than traditional manual methods.
This computational approach helps in understanding 18th-century publishing culture, challenging assumptions about publisher-printer relationships and enabling large-scale analysis previously impossible for historians.
Any questions? Email: digital-lab@hum.leidenuniv.nl for link