L’IA et la manufacture des planches au XVIIIe siècle

Many dictionaries, encyclopedias and treatises of the modern period contain plates illustrating the texts with more or less autonomy depending on the case. These plates are sometimes - and even often, in eighteenth-century dictionaries and encyclopedias - the result of partial borrowings and operations of recomposition from possibly various earlier sources. Identifying these sources and then reconstituting from them the mode of manufacture of these plates (what is called their manufacture) makes it possible to characterize the operations of updating and adapting the contents and modalities of iconographic representations carried out by their authors, then to contribute to characterize, on a larger scale, certain processes of circulation of knowledge through images in this type of corpus. We will give concrete examples of this current research problem and of the new potentialities opened up by AI on the example of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and D'Alembert (1751-1772) and the critical edition currently being conducted in the ENCCRE framework.