From the page to the web: a survey of digital illustration archives

In the past decade, an unprecedented number of illustrations were extracted from the scanned pages of books, periodicals, and newspapers and made available online. Proving the importance of visual culture in the past, these millions of images also posed the challenge of making them searchable and useful. From labour-intensive crowdsourcing to technology-intensive machine learning, several methods have been developed to this end with varying degrees of success. The problems faced and solutions offered in these projects provide insights into the making of visual digital archives. This article aims at analysing the landscape of digital visual archives by focusing on a selection of projects since the beginning of the 2000s. It is a critical review as well as a history of the digital visual archives.