Presentation on Victorian Illustrated Newspapers and Image Analytics

Illustrated Image Analytic: How Computers See Illustrated Victorian Periodicals

This talk offers an early glimpse at ongoing research in adapting image analytic techniques to a large data set of historical illustrations. Our materials include thousands of newspaper illustrations made by wood-engraving, which was the predominant mode of visual mass communication between the 1830s-1890s, before it ceded to halftone processes for printing photographs. This data set challenges the limits of computer vision in non-photographic visual contexts, requiring a blend of supervised and unsupervised methods for processing the data. This research aims to produce historical scholarship on the visual rhetoric of image-based communication in the Victorian periodical press, as well as to develop analytic procedures including workflows and updated algorithms for dealing with non-photographic visual materials at scale.

Speakers : Dr. Paul Fyfe and Qian Ge.