2023 年第十届世界建筑史教学与研究国际研讨会 Images as Instruments: Translating the Contents of a Collection of Printed Media into a Visual Asset for Research, Teaching, and Dissemination Jacopo Benedetti 1 1 Postdoctoral Fellow, College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP), Tongji University, Shanghai Abstract The College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) at Tongji University has recently acquired a remarkable book collection on Western art and architecture: the personal research library of the late Henry A. Millon (1927-2018). The research presented in the paper tries to address the challenges and affordances of this collection. It does that by developing a methodology that leverages heuristic models from data science to interpret, classify, and translate its contents, and to represent them as an interconnected set of associative visual representations. The goal of this approach is to use an image-based language to make the contents of the collection truly accessible for research, teaching, and public outreach. Such a methodology could prove to be at once scalable, economical, and effective, due to the intrinsic capacity of images to foster critical insight, easily overcoming barriers in language, specialization, and cultural background: “images externalize and clarify common ground. They can be understood, revised, and manipulated by a community … they facilitate information processing, they expand long-term memory, they organize thought, they promote inference and discovery. Because they are visual and spatial, they allow human agility in visual-spatial processing and inference” (Tversky, 2011, p. 502). Keywords: book collection, semantic ontology, data visualization, Henry A. Millon, historical & critical studies 1. Introduction The paper presents the framework of an ongoing research conducted at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) of Tongji University 1 . The aim of the research is to interpret, classify, and provide access to a remarkable book collection on the history of Western art and architecture that has been recently acquired by the University: the personal research library of Henry A. Millon (1927-2018). Widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished American architectural historians of his time, Millon devoted of his career to studying the culture of Early Modern Europe. Following a path that had been traced by his mentor Rudolf Wittkower (1901-1971) 2 , he 1 The research is being carried out as part of Postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of professor Li Xiangning; see: Acknowledgment. 2 Millon took part to summer seminars organized by Wittkower at the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, MA), 1954-55 and in Piedmont, Italy, 1958. “I must mention the two summers [1954-55] that Wittkower spent away from London teaching captivating seminars in architectural history at the Fogg. Time spent in his seminars determined much of the path I followed over the next decade [...] His probing lectures on Guarino Guarini in the second summer led to my dissertation on the Palazzo Carignano in Turin, to a valued friendship, and a lifelong engagement with Guarini. [...] [In the] summer of 1958, Wittkower led a three-week seminar on Piedmontese art and architecture from 1600 to 1800 for seven