Vignettes discovery in historical ornaments: Rey database and practices, limits and advances
Résumé
The Marc-Michel Rey database, currently under construction, aims to gather detailed data on the ornaments printed in books addressed to or attributed to this bookseller. The books were published in the 18th century by this bookseller-publisher, who played a central role in the dissemination of Enlightenment thought. The unsupervised decomposition of compound ornaments into vignettes can aid book attribution and provide a better understanding of editorial practices during a period of censorship. This article highlights a shortcoming that currently limits automation of the task via segmentation when the number of glyphs increases. A possible improvement based on diffusion rendering will be discussed.