Iconography

Icono Lausanne Project

Among Lausanne’s iconographic collections are those of the Historical Museum, freely accessible on the museris database. More than 38,600 documents have already been digitized out of a total of nearly 62,500. Mostly photographs, these sources depict Lausanne’s urban landscape, buildings, leisure activities and various events and manifestations. The challenge lies in the automatic georeferencing of these images, using the data already present on the location and structuring the other metadata of the record to infer the latter. In a second step, we have developed a prototype museum interface allowing the corpus to be searched according to place and date.

In parallel, the students of the EPFL and UNIL Humanities and Social Sciences course also developed a project based on these iconographic sources. Their research questioned the impact of the construction of the Lausanne-Ouchy funicular, in 1877, on the role and the relationship between the sites of Flon and Ouchy. Their thematic reading identified 6 themes in which this infrastructure has profoundly changed the city of Lausanne: industry, the lake, nature, society, tourism and transport. Discover all the results on their website (in french).

The iconography of tourism in Lausanne after the construction of the funicular in 1877 © L. Laurent, D. Kofel, G. Abdalla, C. Rudaz, and R. Boscarato.