Explore (Visual Contagions)
Explore is an image search tool designed to trace the circulation of images across millions of historical illustrated publications dating from the 19th century onward.
It was created for the Visual Contagions Project at the College of Humanities, University of Geneva (SNSF 2021–2026), under the direction of Prof. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel.
The available dataset currently includes more than 3.5 million issues from approximately 81,000 illustrated journals published between 1797 and 2021 in 51 countries worldwide.
All journals are open access, some of them provided in IIIF format, and distributed by international partner institutions.
Equipment / Infrastructure
- High-capacity storage and computing servers (image processing and data hosting)
- Georeferenced database
- Image indexing and similarity search engine (deep learning–based)
- IIIF-compatible image delivery system
- OCR and metadata extraction tools (see Fondue)
- Web interface (search, visualization, and data access;
- Visualization tools for statistical, cartographic, and grid analysis)
- Full-text search engine
- Workstations with high-performance GPUs for researchers and engineers
- Collaborative platforms for training, documentation, data management and cleaning, and open access data sharing
Services
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Data and outputs: Data available in web format and CSV format. Cartography and quantitative analysis.
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Contributors are trained—either in person or in hybrid mode—in image analysis production techniques (machine vision with Python, data extraction, transformation, enrichment and analysis).
Address
5 rue De-Candolle
1211 Genève 4