To what extent did illustrations aid readers' understanding of content in Chambers's Encyclo

One of the questions I'm trying to answer with my research is: To what extent did illustrations aid readers' understanding of content? Besides looking through archives and primary material written in the 19th century, something that can be studied is the images themselves.

Earlier this year, I put together an online survey of three of the most frequently illustrated categories of images. One of those categories was of birds, a subjection of the vertebrate category. Using mixed methods methodology, which aimed at collecting both qualitative and some quantitive information, I asked a group of experts through an online survey, several questions to determine if they could recognise certain images, if in their opinion, specific images were communicating accurate scientific information for general audiences, and if they thought the illustrations were of the same species, as the labels in the books indicated.

The particular species in the online survey: grebe, puffin, pigeon, swift, and tit, were chosen because all were illustrated in both first and second editions of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia. They also show how and styles changed between the 1860s and the 1890s. These five image pairs also represent different types of birds that occupy different habitats: water, high cliffs dwellers, and birds that could live in both urban and rural environments. Only five birds were sampled to ensure that the survey was not overly long and to encourage a high completion rate and to minimise survey fatigue.

I was overwhelmed by the responses I got for the bird survey. I was expecting about a dozen responses, but 65 people answered the survey in total. In addition to some of the quantitive information shown above, some of the open-ended questions provided some insightful responses such as:

"These are pretty good - the proportions are a bit off, as seems to be the case in a lot of older illustrations (maybe because they were working from memory and stuffed skins), but the depiction of posture and habitat is solid. "

"The puffin (on the right) is highly stylized. That made it harder to identify. However, if I were at the shore and saw it, there would be enough in this picture to do so."

The feedback sent also highlighted where 19th century artists may have taken liberties with some images, as in the case of the grebe which is shown perching on a branch, as birds are waterfowl and their lobbed feet would have made perching impossible. However, the majority of people looking at these images recognised what the bird was supposed to be represented.

I've actually written and submitted a paper which details some of the findings of this study, and if the paper does get accepted, I'll link it here. The abstract and this survey were one of the many research tools I used to help me answer this question.

Illustrating Birds in the 19th century abstract (pending acceptance): Content analysis of four, nineteenth century encyclopaedias shows that illustrations of vertebrates —mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish and birds—appear more frequently than other types of images within them. This paper focuses on a particular set of bird illustrations that appear in the first two editions of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1860-1892) and discuss how illustration styles changed from the mid to late 1800s, and what those illustration styles attempt to communicate, given the challenges of the process of producing illustrated books at the time. Furthermore, it will look critically at some marketing claims made about the expertise of Chambers’s publications, reporting both on historical evidence to support those claims and the results of an image analysis survey conducted on a group of bird experts. The survey’s aim was to help determine if Chambers’s Encyclopaedia successfully communicated technical and scientific information to readers through their images. The findings of the survey indicate that the bird illustrations provided enough information for laypeople to identify general characteristics of a bird to the level of family, but not necessarily to the level of species. Yet, when comparing images from Chambers with other scientific illustrations circulating at the time, Chambers seems to match their expertise.