Knowing Images

Abstract

brought the relationship between the history of art and the history of science to a new level of intimacy. These, and a host of other scholars, built on the legacies of Julius von Schlosser, Edgar Zilsel, Erwin Panofsky, and, more recently, Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers, in order to probe the relationship between the pictorial arts and the mathematical disciplines, the worlds of collecting, wonder, and the study of nature. Objects that had previously been dismissed or overlooked were brought to the fore: natural-historical drawings and specimens, geometrical diagrams, scientific instruments, and mechanical marvels were placed in dialogue with paintings and sculptures. In an approach influenced by Marxist traditions in the history of science and art, as well as by anthropology as practiced by Clifford Geertz and Marcel Mauss, these artifacts were carefully situated in their economic, social, and intellectual contexts. Most importantly, searching questions were posed about cultures and practices writ large. Modes of observing, recording, and representing; the technologies of investigating nature and producing art; the mixed communities in which such activities took placeall these took center stage. The net result was a radical expansion not only in the types of objects to be studied, but also in the range of the academic disciplines to be embraced and the kinds of historical narratives that could be written. The resulting drift away from the canonbe it of artworks, media, individuals, or notions such as progressmirrored the wider disciplinary change brought about by the rise of visual culture, the rumblings of which were just then starting to be heard. James Elkins's provocative Art Bulletin essay "Art History and Images That Are not Art" (1995) and October's "Visual Culture Questionnaire" (1996) offered a taste of things to come, but the German variety of visual studies-Bildwissenschaft (literally, "science of the image")was only dimly on the horizon of most anglophone scholars at the time. Since the millennium, this new research into early modern art and science has grown to such an extent that it warrants an analytical overview. This essay will

CorDeep and the Sacrobosco Dataset: Detection of Visual Elements in Historical Documents

“…While advancement in the domain of text recognition in historical documents is clear, the same cannot be said of the field of image recognition within these documents, which is often considered a pre-processing step during page layout analysis [ 3 ]. This is all the more remarkable if we consider that historical disciplines have become increasingly concerned with the relationship between text and visual elements, with an ever-increasing number of historical projects dedicated to this subject [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]. While page segmentation approaches, such as [ 7 ], return text/non-text masks, the latter of which often includes visual elements, this remains insufficient for any meaningful historical study, as such approaches often lack accurate visual element localization, as well as semantic classification of these elements.…”

“…Having demonstrated that, in the case of the S-VED, as well as numerous other datasets, YOLO performs better than the current state-of-the-art approaches (see Section 5.2 ) and driven by our belief in the necessity to generate datasets by extracting and studying visual elements in historical corpora [ 12 , 14 , 51 ], we provide a public web-service whose sole objective is to extract visual elements from historical corpora ( , accessed on 2 October 2022) without storing any user data. This web-service is built with the Flask framework and is running on a server of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG).…”

‘Where have all the flowers grown’: the relationship between a plant and its place in sixteenth-century botanical treatises

“…13 For a discussion of the role of images in Renaissance natural history, see KUSUKAWA (2012) and EGMOND (2017a). A nice overview of recent literature on the subject is provided by Alexander Marr (2016). 14 Cooper noticed that the field trips were usually centred on the human world, that is the town and its surroundings which anchored the investigations of local floras.…”

The Big Druid's photographs of trees: Art and knowledge

“…In recent times, in the context of Image Studies, imaging is cherished as 'epistemic agent' (Marr 2016), as 'cultural technique' (Bredekamp 2010;, as a tool for speculative model building (Daston & Galison 2010), rather than merely as illustrative device. Images are experienced as passages or portals or cues (Elsaesser 2013) for sensing and probing during processes of changing, while picturing.…”