Recent advances in object detection facilitated by deep learning have led to numerous solutions in a myriad of fields ranging from medical diagnosis to autonomous driving. However, historical research is yet to reap the benefits of such advances. This is generally due to the low number of large, coherent, and annotated datasets of historical documents, as well as the overwhelming focus on Optical Character Recognition to support the analysis of historical documents. In this paper, we highlight the importance of visual elements, in particular illustrations in historical documents, and offer a public multi-class historical visual element dataset based on the Sphaera corpus. Additionally, we train an image extraction model based on YOLO architecture and publish it through a publicly available web-service to detect and extract multi-class images from historical documents in an effort to bridge the gap between traditional and computational approaches in historical studies.

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The Sphere project stands at the intersection of the humanities and information sciences. The project aims to better understand the evolution of knowledge in the early modern period by studying a collection of 359 textbook editions published between 1472 and 1650 which were used to teach geocentric cosmology and astronomy at European universities. The relatively large size of the corpus at hand presents a challenge for traditional historical approaches, but provides a great opportunity to explore such a large collection of historical data using computational approaches. In this paper, we present a review of the different computational approaches, used in this project over the period of the last three years, that led to a better understanding of the dynamics of knowledge transfer and transformation in the early modern period.