15cBOOKTRADE: The visualization of the circulation of books over time and space and image-searching tool: how we got there

Cristina Dondi and Matilde Malaspina of the 15C BOOKTRADE project, give a talk for the 2017 DHOXSS. Cristina will present 15cV, a powerful tool for the visualization of the movement of fifteenth-century printed books, from the time and place where they were printed to where they are today, via the many places and people who distributed, purchased, owned, and annotated them during the intervening 500-year period. This tool enables unanswered historical queries on the impact of printing on early modern society to be addressed for the first time. Cristina will illustrate how the project is making its visualization possible, and outlines how the project, one of the largest collaborative enterprises in the humanities, was set up and continues to grow. Matilde will present the 15cBOOKTRADE project, a collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford). This project is testing the application of a series of digital cataloguing and searching methods on fifteenth-century printed images. The work is based on the integrated application of instance-based (i.e. image) and class-based (i.e. text) retrieval. The objective of the collaboration is the creation of a new tool capable of systematically tracking and investigating the production, use, circulation, and copy of woodblocks, iconographic subjects, artistic styles, etc. within fifteenth-century printed illustrated editions.