The Lyon 16ci – A visually searchable database as instrument of knowledge for book illustrations printed in Lyon between 1480 and 1600

Abstract

The Lyon16ci is an online database of illustrations printed in Lyon in the 16th century. It presents a collection of 10000 digitized illustrated pages along with several early modern woodblocks; it can be searched using an image as a search query as well as using text keyword for searching metadata assigned to the illustrations. Such visual and text search capability allows research scholars to track and investigate the production, use, circulation and copying of woodblocks, iconographic subjects, artistic styles within 16th-century printed illustrated editions. As this database combines visual and metadata search using VISE imagematching software, it becomes an intermedial instrument of knowledge which revisit the possibilities of searching through the book. The modalities of working with this digital tool for printed illustrations relate to the more theoretical questions of intermediality in digital art historical research: the digital object is embedded in a world of its own, in a system of relations to different entities which allow the user to see the relationships among similar or identical items (tracing the so-called trajectory of the image). How do we categorize and implement these visual capabilities? How do we develop the granularity of both visual and metadata search? Ultimately, which possibilities open up when working digitally with a complex artistic object such as the illustrated printed page, in terms of collecting, digitizing, indexing and sharing?