Keynote Session 2.

Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Art historian, Full Professor at Geneva University in Switzerland (UNIGE), and chair of Digital Humanities

Illustrated journals are today available digitally in unprecedented, even epochal quantities, and on a global scale. As such, they therefore provide ideal historical objects to approach the question of centres and peripheries in history of art and literature through the prism of "distant reading and viewing". While we do not claim to demonstrate one centrality rather than another, by means of cartographies or overly rapid counting, a computational approach may still raise new questions on the international circulation of images in illustrated periodicals. It may help reinterpret, even better understand, the variety of flows and imbalances in international circulation of images, often considered as evidence of centrality or peripherality. 

This paper presents the perspectives opened by the Visual Contagions project (visualcontagions.unige.ch, SNSF, University of Geneva, CH), which currently analyses the images of thousands of illustrated periodicals published throughout the world from the 1890s to the 1990s. Images do not circulate magically, nor do styles 'diffuse' and prove ‘influences,’ as art history often has it. The computational approach allows us to highlight commercial networks of image circulation; affinities between magazines and cultural or social milieus; as well as social logics in the circulation of images and styles; but also diffusions difficult to explain otherwise than by a Zeitgeist of which such images would be the mirror. These directions are all born from a heuristic use of machines, which are further to be fathomed using traditional sources and methods, in order to hopefully extract surprising or challenging new narratives regarding the international geography of periodicals.