Methods Bazar
Distant-Viewing Alchemical Laboratory Apparatus in Early Modern Print
An event of the Digital Lab. Digital methods and tools of the digital humanities are presented and discussed in the Methods Bazar format. The methods presentation is aimed at anyone interested in learning about such tools and methods or integrating them into their research.
Dr. Sarah Lang (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz)
Distant-Viewing Alchemical Laboratory Apparatus in Early Modern Print
This talk explores the use of modern computer vision methods for object detection in historical images extracted from 16th-17th-century printed books with illustrations of distillation, mining, metallurgy, and alchemical objects. We found that the transfer of knowledge from contemporary photographic data to historical etchings proves less effective than anticipated, revealing limitations in current methods like visual feature descriptors, pixel segmentation, representation learning, and object detection with YOLOv8. These findings highlight the stylistic disparities between modern images and early print illustrations, suggesting new research directions for historical image analysis.
Online Participation
Clicke here to participate via Zoom.