TSNE

Scientific illustrations are captured from the 254 editions of treatises printed between 1472 and 1650 that contain Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera. The images are then analysed through TSNE. TSNE is based on VIKUSViewer originally developed by students at the FH Potsdam within a course on visualising cultural collections. The developer of VIKUSViewer, Christopher Pietsch, implemented an additional layout for arranging images by similarity. Raw vector (1000 dimensions). A TSNE algorithm is used to arrange the images in the visualisation. TSNE is a method for projecting high-dimensional data to a two-dimensional space in a way that items similar in the high-dimensional vector space are positioned close to each other. It is a non-deterministic method, which means that there is an element of randomness as to where exactly images will be positioned. The advantage of this method is that no additional metadata are needed as it can work on the image collection itself, though metadata can be con