ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Visualising Knowledge: Computational Approaches to Global Botanical Epistemologies

• In Event: Grafting Colonial Botanies

English Abstract

The history of botany is shaped by the contested, global encounter between diverse indigenous traditions such as Mesoamerican, Ayurvedic, and Chinese Bencao systems, and the classificatory regimes of European empires. This study challenges the singular narrative of discovery and the reductive logic of the Linnaean taxonomic gaze that structured colonial documentation and resource extraction.
We introduce Phyto-Vision, a novel computational approach that transforms historical botanical imagery into a quantifiable corpus for analysis. Our approach first addresses the core Digital Humanities challenge of image retrieval and corpus construction from fragmented sources, enabling the automated extraction of illustrations from diverse, large-scale digitised archives. Our corpus spans over 500 years of botanical documentation, including illustrations from Mesoamerican codices, Ayurvedic herbals, and Chinese Bencao texts, contrasted with European herbals.
We employ a subsequent two-part comparative analysis: Visual Syntactic Classification, which quantifies distinct indigenous versus colonial visual grammars, and Multimodal Feature Extraction, which correlates visual representation with vernacular and Linnaean nomenclature.
Our results reveal epistemic pluralism, highlighting divergent visual classification strategies and thematic emphases across global botanical traditions. By systematically assessing the extent of the colonial project of ordering and by demonstrating the visual persistence of indigenous botanical knowledge, this research not only reframes the history of botany but demonstrates how computational methods can uncover hidden knowledge systems and model a pathway for decolonising visual epistemologies in global scientific archives.

Author

• Guang Yang, University College Cork