scientific illustrations in early modern literature
Résumé
Résumé: Scientific illustrations (schemes, board, maps, geometrical draws, diagrams) edited in non-
scientific productions (literature, law, theology, philosophy) published in medieval and early modern
manuscripts or printed matter, designed as ornamentation in engravings or drawings or even on
clothing, textiles and artefacts are frequently found in European libraries and museum but remain
untapped whereas they are still digitalized. Individual collections donated to these libraries or
museum reveal a visual literacy and the consistency of the knowledge of the donator but also the
“making-of” of our European culture through a diversity of books edited in many European
locations, disciplines or legacies. To expose this European cultural consistency and to study these
illustrations, specific corpus located in representative parts of European libraries or museum
(Belgium, France, Portugal, Romania, United-Kingdom) are selected by our team. Each collection of
illustrated books, objects or textiles will generate amounts of datas (digitalisation and database with
their shapes, patterns, lines, colors) and will be classified in order to elaborate a history of European
data visualisation. This classification will be organized and promoted with both literary or historian
studies, and new computing tools and search engines’ reports. These tools will be configured to
discover similar or specific patterns, shapes and lines inside these pictures but will also deal with
many challenges: manuscripted character recognition, automatic exploration of non figurative
pictures and annoted images, big data on digital humanities produced in several languages and
quality of impression. Our main purpose is to identify European way of thinking with scientific
imagery and epistemic pictures in a non-scientific framework: as a European visual literacy could be
useful nowadays, we will try to experiment these early modern models and patterns to collect,
synthetize and visualize nowadays datas, included lost and immaterial datas. Ethical issues,
misinterpretations and audience ‘s manipulation will be taken into account to select patterns and
figurative models.