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NWO grant for the Facebook of the past: ‘Circulating images aren’t new’

GIFs, memes and videos: anyone who opens a social media platform can be in no doubt that today we live in a visual culture. But the role of images in social communications isn’t new, says Associate Professor Marika Keblusek. She has been awarded a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Open Competition (Large) grant to study the circulation of images in early modern Europe.

‘A new genre emerged in northern Europe around 1550: the friendship album or album amicorum,’ says Keblusek. ‘Sometimes these were empty notebooks, and sometimes existing books with many illustrations. The common denominator in all cases is that students would take them along on their travels and ask their fellow students, professors or other high-profile individuals to place their signature or another inscription on the blank pages.’

The idea of these friendship albums quickly caught on. Very soon, it wasn’t only students who had these albums, but also soldiers, merchants and travel-loving women. ‘They were naturally the preserve of people with enough money to travel, for example,’ she adds. ‘But it was really a very popular and widespread genre. Some people used it only very briefly, but others would pass on their friendship album to the next generation.’

Facebook of the past

This makes the albums very interesting for historians, who use the inscriptions to reconstruct networks from hundreds of years ago. Who had contact – albeit fleetingly – with whom? ‘Those albums were actually a social medium,’ explains Keblusek. ‘In exactly the same way as Facebook, the “friends” weren’t necessarily friends as such. They were mainly people who wanted something from each other.’

She herself is not so interested in that ‘friends list’, but rather in the visual aspect of the albums. Just as today on Instagram and Facebook, people liked to add an appropriate illustration to their text. Keblusek: ‘Those illustrations were sometimes painted by craftspeople, for instance in the case of coats-of-arms. Album users had extra blank pages bound into illustrated bibles, for example, or ‘emblem books’: a moralistic genre with a motto, explanatory verse and allegorical image that depicted the moral.’

A striking feature of the images is that they are often repeated. They may be a variation on the same theme or may come from the same source. Keblusek: ‘We know that the illustrations are often based on well-known prints: black-and-white exemplars that were then painted in colour. In the case of allegorical images, you often see that the same colours are chosen. I want to know who produced these images, how they made choices. We know that craftspeople were often hired, but we actually have no idea who they were. Where did they get their pictures from? How do these images move from one book to another?’

Digitisation

For a long time, doing this kind of research was arduous: researchers had to look through thousands of prints and albums. Technology  now offers a solution to this problem. Keblusek: ‘One of the most important elements of the study is that we’re going to create a database containing as many album images as possible. The technology for image recognition is still largely in the early stages, but we will be working with colleagues from Digital Humanities and will also involve libraries in our research. How do you unlock access to images? When there’s a man with a club, does a catalogue only give keywords like “man” and “club”, or also “Hercules”? We will be talking with experts about decisions and interpretations of this kind.’

Keblusek ultimately wants to use the resulting database for other purposes, as well as academic research. ‘It would be great to create an exhibition of the most frequently found images. We’d like to invite visitors to compile their own album with the images. The great diversity of pictures, the exuberant use of colour and the often humorous subjects make the images attractive to a very wide audience.’

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