scientific illustrations in early modern literature

Résumé En

: Scientific illustrations (schemes, board, maps, geometrical draws, diagrams) edited in non-scientific productions (literature, law, theology, philosophy) published in medieval and early modernmanuscripts or printed matter, designed as ornamentation in engravings or drawings or even onclothing, textiles and artefacts are frequently found in European libraries and museum but remainuntapped whereas they are still digitalized. Individual collections donated to these libraries ormuseum 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 Europeanlocations, disciplines or legacies. To expose this European cultural consistency and to study theseillustrations, specific corpus located in representative parts of European libraries or museum(Belgium, France, Portugal, Romania, United-Kingdom) are selected by our team. Each collection ofillustrated books, objects or textiles will generate amounts of datas (digitalisation and database withtheir shapes, patterns, lines, colors) and will be classified in order to elaborate a history of Europeandata visualisation. This classification will be organized and promoted with both literary or historianstudies, and new computing tools and search engines’ reports. These tools will be configured todiscover similar or specific patterns, shapes and lines inside these pictures but will also deal withmany challenges: manuscripted character recognition, automatic exploration of non figurativepictures and annoted images, big data on digital humanities produced in several languages andquality of impression. Our main purpose is to identify European way of thinking with scientificimagery and epistemic pictures in a non-scientific framework: as a European visual literacy could beuseful 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 andfigurative models.