Editing and analysing hIstorical astronomical Diagrams with Artificial intelligence – EIDA

For centuries across Eurasia the astral sciences were fostered to meet a wide range of religious, ritualistic and political needs, to observe and understand the natural world. Consequently, in multiple interrelated cultural contexts, practitioners compiled manuscripts including numerical tables, texts and diagrams, of which hundreds of thousands are extant. EIDA will focus on diagrams as a visual heritage and vehicles for astronomical and mathematical arguments in the astral sciences. To this end, the project will develop and implement a radically new approach in the study of astronomical diagrams in pre and early modern periods by creating and leveraging novel and specific automatic image analysis tools . The two main objectives of EIDA are: (1) addressing the variety of functions and circulation modes of diagrams in the history of astronomy by jointly analyzing both their epistemic and documentary aspects in astral sciences (2) the development of new computer vision approaches, able to decompose an astronomical diagram into components meaningful for analysis and edition, without relying on human annotation. EIDA associates the recent progress in ‘analysis-by-synthesis’ approaches in computer vision and the recent ‘visual turn’ in history of astronomy in a deep interdisciplinary perspective. This collaboration is timely in light of data availability and will allow us to conduct refined analysis on an unprecedented scale disclosing otherwise inaccessible historical results. Moreover, in line with open science principles, EIDA shall develop tools for harvesting, studying, editing and visualizing diagrams through a web interface, modelled on the existing DISHAS platform for astronomical tables. The new platform will enable the research community to access the tools employed to produce the results published by EIDA.