Visual
Contagions
ART, IMAGES, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF CULTURES FROM THE PRINTED ERA TO THE INTERNET
The VISUAL CONTAGIONS project studies the global circulation of images in the print era over a century, from the 1890s to the advent of the Internet. It describes and analyzes how certain images have circulated more than others - in reproductions, copies, pastiches, imitations -, through which channels and according to which chronology they have spread. The ambition is to understand what makes an image successful, but also to identify how the circulation of images has contributed to the globalization of cultures, and whether or not it reveals the symbolic domination of certain countries and cultures over others according to the times.
Visual Contagions is a project in Digital Humanities: computational methods are applied to objects and questions in the humanities.
Visual Contagions is a project in Digital Humanities: computational methods are applied to objects and questions in the humanities (here, art history and cultural history), along with more traditional methods. The team uses quantitative analysis, geographical and chronological visualization, digital analysis of texts, as well as computer vision - algorithmic description of content, style or period of images, automatic pattern recognition. These methods make it possible to approach and compare large corpora, on a global scale and over a long period of time. The results of the numerical study are then confronted with the historical interpretation of the images.