Art into data | engineering WImBo

The Watermark Imaging Box (WImBo) Project is an inter-institutional collaboration to develop a low-cost, portable system for imaging watermarks and chain lines in papers, with a special focus on the prints of Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669) and his pupils. Watermarks, and associated chain lines, can provide scholars with important information about the origins of prints and their interrelationships. Significant effort has been devoted to the characterization of these attributes, yielding valuable insights for art historians, museum curators, and private collectors. However, existing methods have limitations that inhibit widespread application. WImBo aims to address these challenges through the development of a low-cost, easily used, portable system for imaging watermarks and chain lines in paper — an imaging “box” delivered to collections of any scale, enabling them to rapidly produce repeatable image data from their print collections. These data, shared and networked, not only would provide a more comprehensive catalog of existing watermarks but also a dataset for the development of automatic classification schemes. This strategy is built on the success of related challenges in the emergent field of computational art history. These key antecedent projects provide a context for the WImBo engineering design process.