Flora Danica
See the Flora Danica dataset, which contains several thousand digitised images of coloured copperplate engravings of wild plants from Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein.
Photo: Flora Danica
The material behind the dataset
The Flora Danica dataset contains a digitised and structured version of an illustrated work which is important for Danish cultural history. The work is a comprehensive historical botanical book series consisting of 51 main and three supplementary editions published in Copenhagen from 1761 to 1883. The work contains 3,240 coloured copperplate engravings, each illustrating a plant either in life size or enlarged if it is a small plant. The publication's popularity in Danish culture is related to the fact that the Royal Porcelain Factory, now Royal Copenhagen, started producing the exclusive Flora Danica tableware in 1802.
When the work was first published, it was entitled Drawings of Plants which grow wild in the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, in the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and in the Counties of Oldenborg and Delmenhorst to illustrate the work on these Plants carried out under the title Flora Danica by Royal Order. It is obvious why it is often simply called "Flora Danica". The original books can be borrowed as reading room loans at the library.
Read about the book in the library system.
About the dataset
The Flora Danica dataset consists of 3,240 digitised images of coloued copperplate engravings of wild plants, primarily found in Denmark and the neighbouring Scandinavian countries. The images are high-quality .tif files and are organized into 14 zip files, each containing up to 250 .tif files. In addition, the dataset contains an index file with metadata about plant species and details about the publications (Index_FloraDanica.xlsx).
The data in the index file is relatively well-structured, allowing for searching, filtering, and analyzing information about the plants, illustrations, and publication data. The accompanying GitHub notebook contains examples of how to process the dataset to make it appear cleaner and richer, opening up even more potential uses.
The original images are of very different sizes, ranging from 5x5 cm to approximately 25x45 cm. The scale between the original image sizes has not been preserved in the digital version.
The dataset can potentially contribute to new research within history and cultural heritage, and with inspiration from the accompanying notebook in GitHub, it can be used in teaching, among other things, digital humanities, data processing and data analysis with real-life data.
What can you do with the dataset?
The material is free from copyright. You may copy, modify, distribute or perform the work, even for commercial purposes, without asking permission. Always remember to credit the author.
The creation of the dataset
The digitisation was carried out at the Natural and Health Sciences Library in 1997, and the images were published online so that users could browse the images. The images are currently exhibited online in Digital Collections.
Find datasets and guidance material
You can find the Flora Danica images in two ways. In Digital Collections you can enjoy the individual images in high resolution and you can download them individually. From LOAR you can download the many images packed in zip files and you can download an index file which contains more information about each image.
