14 milioni di immagini, che spaziano dal 1500 fino almeno ai primi anni del ‘900, saranno presto disponibili in rete senza alcuna restrizione di copyright grazie a Flickr e a The Internet Archive.
Stiamo parlando di un progetto che ha permesso la digitalizzazione di oltre 600 milioni di pagine di libri rendendoli accessibili a chiunque voglia leggerli, consultarli e studiarli online. Le immagini contenute dentro questa enorme mole di scansioni stanno ora confluendo in uno stream fotografico sull’album Flickr del progetto, divise secondo diverse etichette: titolo del libro, autori, soggetti, anno di pubblicazione ed editori. È inoltre possibile, dall’immagine, passare direttamente alla consultazione della pagina del libro digitalizzato.
L’archivio comprenderà 14 milioni tra foto e cartografie d’epoca, disegni, illustrazioni, ritratti, riproduzioni di opere d’arte, pubblicità, schemi e progetti. Una ricchezza sconfinata di sapere, prezioso ma soprattutto economico (non esiste infatti nessuna restrizione all’uso di tutte queste fonti) per la didattica, la grafica di siti, libri o per corredare articoli e saggi. E, non ultima, da inserire nelle voci relative di Wikipedia.
The Internet Archive is best known for its historical library of the web, preserving more than 400 billion web pages dating back to 1996. Yet, its 19 petabytes include more than 600 million pages of digitized texts dating back more than 500 years. What would it look like if those 600 million pages could be “read” completely differently? What if every illustration, drawing, chart, map, or photograph became an entry point, allowing one to navigate the world’s books not as paragraphs of text, but as a visual tapestry of our lives? How would we learn and explore knowledge differently? Those were the questions that launched a project to catalog the imagery of half a millennium of books.
A Yahoo research fellow at Georgetown University, Kalev Leetaru, extracted over 14 million images from 2 million Internet Archive public domain eBooks that span over 5 centuries of content, compiling more than 14 million high resolution images spanning nearly every topic imaginable. Each image includes detailed descriptions, including the subject tags of the book it came from and the text immediately surrounding it on the page. The latter is especially powerful, as it allows to keyword search 500 years of images, instantly accessing particular topics or themes. Searching for love yields a myriad images of cherubs and courtship, while mortis (death) offers a glimpse into the early modern period’s fascination with the subject. A search for bird offers a vividly colorful showcase of the world’s bird species, while searching for telephone traces the invention’s history from its introduction as an electric novelty to its widespread adoption.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about this collection is that these images come not from some newly-unearthed archive being seen for the first time, but rather from the books that we have been digitizing for years that have been resting in our digital libraries. Through the power of big data we are suddenly able to view the world’s books not as merely piles of text, but as individualized galleries of one of the richest and most diverse museums of imagery in the world.
