Image Reincarnation in Early Modern Dutch Illustrated Travelogues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1672 two Amsterdam publishing houses produced competing illustrated travelogues by authors Olfert Dapper and Philip Baldaeus about the Indian subcontinent. Both of these expensive, folio-sized books prominently featured full-page illustrations of the Dasávatāra (the ten earthly incarnations of the Hindu god, Viṣṇu). Books featuring illustrations and descriptions of anthropomorphic, multi-armed deities carried high stakes for the publishers and authors in terms of economic success, professional reputation, and intellectual impact not only in the Netherlands but across Europe. This project demonstrates how the handling of the subject and visualization of Hindu deities and cosmography revealed the producers’ positionality in terms of the intellectual debates surrounding comparative religion, conceptions of chronology, and depictions of race in the texts and images. The two divergent approaches in text and images, however, guide the reader to draw opposing conclusions about Hindu cosmography, the validity of Hinduism as a religion, and the people who hold these beliefs and worldview. By retracing Dapper’s and Baldaeus’ sources, contributions, and legacy, I demonstrate how the pervasive thoughts on comparative religions, race, and global chronology shaped European conceptions of Hindu belief. This project reveals how these two Dutch publishers appealed to newly found strengths in global trade and knowledge production to work through internal religious and political anxieties while simultaneously asserting themselves as a superior force on the world stage. \n
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".