Dear all,

The Illustrated London News (ILN) revolutionized Victorian media by pioneering the integration of high-quality wood engravings with news content, reaching over a million viewers at its peak. While digitization has enabled text-based analysis of the ILN, its visual content remains difficult to explore and analyse. We address this challenge by presenting a dataset of 72,081 wood-engraved illustrations extracted from the ILN (1842-1890), accompanied by multimodal embeddings and a Flask application for retrieval. We create a searchable corpus of the ILN that enables users to find illustrations using textual queries, (modern) images, or image-text combinations. The resulting dataset and application allow flexible analysis of nineteenth-century visual representations of news, and suggest new avenues for research in computational humanities, media history, periodical studies, and visual culture studies. At the same time, this presentation also underscores the limitations of interpreting historical imagery with modern AI models, identifying the potential effects of bias and interpretive distortion.

Thomas Smits is an assistant professor of Digital History and AI at the University of Amsterdam. His book The European Illustrated Press (Routledge, 2019) won the 2020 RSVP Colby Book Award. Recent work has been published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Visual Studies, New Media and Society, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and Visual Communication.

We hope to see you there,