Visual Search and the User’s Experience: The Lyon16ci and the 1516 Databases

The project Le Livre Illustré à Lyon 1480–1600 (CNRS, Equipex Biblissima) collected over 10000 illustrations printed in the city during the sixteenth century, indexing iconographically a selection of these images in the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database and finding new ways of searching and visualizing illustrations. Using the Lyon16ci and the 1516 Databases, which were created in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, users can now search and visualize these illustrations in a number of ways. The present article gives an overview of the project and presents the search possibilities that these databases provide.