Heraldry and Information Technology

 Heraldry and Information Technology

By Paul D Jagger

This instalment of The Herald builds on an earlier article about the work of Quentin Peacock, the renowned heraldic artist who works in digital form. Quentin is the first Artist in Residence to the Cambridge University Heraldic & Genealogical Society.

 

How suited is Heraldry to the world of IT?

 

At first glance the worlds of heraldry and information technology have little in common; one decidedly analogue, represented in many forms in the physical world, the other based on representation of data in the digital world of zeros and ones. However, a closer inspection reveals heraldry to be well suited to the digital realm both as a science and an art form. 

Just five short years ago in December 2019PP (pre-pandemic) Quentin Peacock (see previous article in The Herald) and I co-delivered a lecture on Digital Heraldry at the livery hall of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT) in the City of London. It seemed like an appropriate venue as the Information Technologists’ Company is a past winner of the Heraldry Society’s Corporate Heraldry Award, and a proud user of its arms both digital and physical forms.

During the lecture Quentin and I explored the various developments in digital heraldic design, from the earliest examples of computer graphics in the 1980s, through to contemporary usage as a highly adaptable form of heraldic representation in vector graphic format. We also took a glimpse into a future where genealogical information might be encoded into a digital coat of arms using steganographic techniques and amorial registers might be shared, managed and verified using block-chain technology.

 

Why is Heraldry suited to IT?

 

Heraldry lends itself to clear, unambiguous description in a manner than most art forms do not. The language of blazon is ideally suited to IT as it has a standard dictionary of terms, rules (grammar) and conventions that can be converted into software code.

Blazon is also the ultimate form of alternative test description for accessibility purposes. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) specify that all imagery and video used on the web should have a written description that can be read by screen reader software, or other assistive technologies to aid the visually impaired. Blazon fulfils that need with remarkable clarity and economy of words.

 

A bumpy start to digital heraldry.

 

It is fair to say that heraldry in the digital realm has not enjoyed the best of reputations as the web has provided an unregulated marketplace for bucket-shop heraldry, more accurately ‘heraldic fraud’ to proliferate. While it is not the job of the heraldic authorities to police the web, they could do more to educate and warn, just as financial institutions do to counter financial fraud committed over the web. There are copious outlets on the web offering to sell you your ‘family crest’, spreading the lie that that coats of arms are for surnames. Heraldic fraud is nothing new, the Victorian era enjoyed a lively trade in bogus genealogy and assumed arms conjured up in the minds of hucksters and mountebanks. What is different about the era of the world-wide web is the pace and scale with which the trade has been able to expand.

 

That said, a clear distinction must be drawn between the myriad bucket shop outlets on the web that offer to sell you a copy of a digital picture of a coat of arms, and the legitimate work of the heraldic artist who works in digital form either designing new arms or depicting arms that have been granted by a heraldic authority. So, what has changed since our joint lecture of 2019?

 

Heraldry and AI

 

Advances in Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing have reached the point where it is feasible to create an AI system capable of rendering a blazon in visual form and reversing a visual representation of arms (eg., from a photo or video) back to blazon. Such an AI app would be ideally suited to use on a mobile phone to identify arms in all manner of physical forms. Any such solution would of course need a large language model (LLM) comprising billions of images of arms and associated contextualizing information such a genealogical record. The work being done by the Court of Lord Lyon to bring the national register of arms of Scotland to the web will greatly aid the development of AI apps for Scottish Heraldry.

 

Advances in Generative AI

 

The advent of Generative AI (a phenomenon that has taken off in just the last 2 years) has enabled the rapid creation of imagery that has a heraldic look and feel yet is not developed from blazon. Such images, while easy to generate, seem to fall into the realm of faux heraldry. The following example took my employer’s imagine generate AI app less than 5 seconds to generate based on the following text “Create a view inside a mediaeval castle dining hall with coats of arms on shields and banners around the walls and over a fireplace”. It is impressive that AI can render this image so quickly but there is no true heraldry here, and nothing based on a blazon. In fairness I did not provide a blazon to this AI, but as you'll see further on, AI is beginning to understand blazon.

Nevertheless, the image created here shows the potential of AI to render heraldry with remarkable speed, it just needs to learn more about blazon.

 

Today most AI image generation tools have no understanding of blazon, but they can create something approximating to a coat of arms based on a natural language description. One example among many such tools is OpenArt’s AI Coat of Arms Generator.

 

https://openart.ai/generator/coat-of-arms

 

For example the following text prompt resulted in the six images being rendered in a matter of seconds: “A coat of arms on a shield featuring a white background, a red bow and arrow pointing downward a blue chief with embattlement at the bottom and three white roses on the chief”.As can be seen the results are quite wide of the mark, but the point Is not what this AI can do today, but what it has been able to learn in a matter of a couple of years. Imagine giving the same instructions to a two-year old child armed with some crayons and paper. The pace at which AI learns outstrips human ability, and it learns in parallel from billions of sources.

So how good is AI at rendering a blazon today? 

 

I tried out the following request on three popular GenAI tools, and my company’s internal tool: “Render this blazon: Argent a bow fesswise fully drawn and charged with an arrow point downward gules on a chief embattled azure three roses argent barbed and seeded or”. To my surprise my employer’s GenAI tool made the best attempt among the commercial tools (left below), but it still has a way to go before it will be able to render a digital image as accurate as Quentin’s work (right) which is drawn by hand using vector graphic software. That said, Quentin’s work (right below) can be exported in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) format, which offers the potential to go the other way with a blazon to SGML engine which could render vector graphic imagery precisely representing a blazon.

Predictions for the future

 

The pace at which AI is advancing, and the growth of Large Language Models based on publicly available text, video and imagery will eventually lead to the creation of systems that will aid the amateur heraldist, and professional genealogist alike. 

 

For example: Just twelve months ago I was paying for an app that could recognise plants from a single photo, that capability is now built into my phone’s photo app by default. What’s more it can scan any image to find relevant content on the web. Recently I used it to identify the whereabouts of a monument in a hamlet in the Wye Valley from an image on a third-party website… how much longer before I can use it to scan a photo of arms in a book, receive reverse engineered blazon, an AI generated pedigree of the armiger and driving directions to the grave of the most recent head grantee to bear those arms? 

 

It won’t be long before AI can make a well informed if imperfect judgement as to whether arms are genuine or faux, since it is also learning from the array of bogus heraldry in online bucket shops.

What does this mean for the future of the professional herald?

 

Professor Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School specializes in workplace technology and especially the use of AI. He co-authored the book Competing in the Age of AI. In my view, his prediction for the future of work is as true for the Herald as it is for the Harvard scholar: “AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without”. 

 

About the author

 

Paul D Jagger is a Chartered IT Professional, Fellow of BCS The Chartered Institute for IT and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

The author has included the below image, to demonstrate how the WCIT coat of arms appears after a few too many glasses of port! 

Footnote: 

 

The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (https://wcit.org.uk) is the most recent IT related corporate body based in the UK to be granted arms, but it is not the only technology centric armiger. 

 

Other armigerous bodies in the IT profession include The Institution of Analysts and Programmers (https://www.iap.org.uk) which was granted arms by Garter Conrad Swan in 1994, and The British Computer Society, now BCS The Chartered Institute for IT (https://www.bcs.org) granted arms by Garter Anthony Wagner in 1970.  

 

BCS decided to include charges in the form of two magnetic-core memory module (see image below), a storage technology that was absolute by the time the arms were presented - such is the pace of change in IT, and a lesson in why it is rarely a good idea to incorporate transient technology in arms! 

 

The earliest grant to a professional body in the broad field of technology is that made to the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1948, a body that has, through numerous mergers of become The Institution of Engineering and Technology (The IET) in 2006.