This beta site is made to help folks dig just a little bit deeper into books they’re curious about.
Have you ever seen an old book and just had a hunch there’s something interesting about how it was put together? What if the color of its paper–yes paper–offered important clues?
On this site, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, you can plug in some details from online rare books repositories and examine the color profile of every page in the book.
Maybe your book was printed in two different shops? Maybe it was printed in two different eras? Maybe someone inserted some illicit sheets after it had passed the censors?
If so, chances are you’ll see those kinds of things in the data.
Give it a try.
This tool currently works from IIIF-manifests from the following rare books repositories:
Library | Manifest Format |
---|---|
British Library | https://api.bl.uk/metadata/iiif/ark:/[Piece 1]/[Piece 2]/manifest.json |
Cambridge | https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/iiif/[Piece 1] |
Folger Shakespeare Library | https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/iiif/m/[Piece 1]/manifest |
Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin | https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/notDM/objectManifest/[Piece 1]/[Piece 2]/ |
Harvard | https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/[Piece 1] |
Internet Archive | https://iiif.archivelab.org/iiif/[Piece 1]/manifest.json |
IIIF-manifests for each of these libraries takes the specified form, where the part(s) in [ ]
brackets are unique identifiers.
Click “View Plot” or “Extract Color Information.” The plot on the left is keyed to images on the right. Click a point and see its associated image.
Explore LUV, RGB, median, and mean permutations.
Download your data. The tool doesn’t currently store your history, so you won't be able to come back to this set of rectangle selections. Downloading your data is at present the only way to document your results and make them persist.
We love to hear about interesting examples! We’d even love to use some examples in our papers. If you find something cool, by all means let us know. You can email us at cnwarren at cmu dot edu or tag us on Twitter @chrisvvarren or @sammuellemey.
Want researchers to be able to use this tool for your collections? Make sure your IIIF platform has CORS enabled and let us know where we can find your manifests via the email addresses above.
This tool is currently unpolished and a bit unstable. (Max wrote it while sitting up with a sleepless infant, with all of the careful planning and attention to detail that implies.) We welcome feedback about bugs or potential improvements, but are also currently limited in the time that we have available for development. If you are comfortable with React and would like to contribute, let us know!
Developed primarily by Max G’Sell with input from Samuel Lemley, Christopher Warren, and Matthew Lincoln as part of the Print & Probability research project. Intro and instructions by Chris Warren.