Abstract:
<aside> 💡 The study of ornaments has been a long tradition in multiple disciplines including archaeology, culture studies, and history. It focuses a lot on studying the visual aspect of the artefact and links visual features back to the broader context. However, Ornaments are not always the most accessible materials for researchers and given the trend of studying culture and history with quantitative datasets, ornament study starts to lose its popularity. This project uses Iznik tiles as a case study and created a workflow to i) leverage multiple sources of photographic images, and ii) automatically extract and analyse motifs. The aim of the project is to pave the way for large scale ornament studies with multiple sources of data, including crowdsourcing approaches. The key features of a motif (size, shape, location, and colour), along with proper metadata and ontologies, can be used to infer characteristics/styles of a region/period and serve as the foundation for understanding the connections and changes of cultures.
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