EBBA and the British Library: Making Popular Ballads of the Past more Present
FAIN: PW-258977-18
University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)
Patricia Fumerton (Project Director: July 2017 to March 2022)
The continued development of the English Broadside
Ballad Archive (EBBA) with the addition of 1,300 rare, pre-1701 printed ballads
held at the British Library. In
addition, the project would catalog 905 tune titles and approximately 18,250
woodcut impressions, as well as enhance access to the existing ballad
collection by providing faceted searching and other features to improve the
user experience.
The Univ. of California-Santa Barbara requests critical funding to launch its penultimate, 7th phase of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), significantly expanding the archive with 1,300 rare ballads from the British Library, many unique. As always, EBBA will provide high-quality color facsimiles, text transcriptions, deep cataloging in TEI/XML/MARC, recordings, and informative essays. In this phase, we will also enhance our interface with 1) configurable, faceted searches; 2) user controls and MEI encoding of tune recordings and their transcriptions; and 3) sophisticated human cataloging of the ballads' illustrative woodcuts, matched by our existing image-association software. Additionally, we will develop a new section to support K-12 and undergraduate pedagogy, with class plans and interactive tools. EBBA will in the process widen access to these crucial cultural artifacts so that scholars, students and the general public can engage with them as text, data, art, and song.
Associated Products
The English Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Book)Title: The English Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive.
In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama.
A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16137.htmlAccess Model: Print book for purchase; companion website
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780812252316
Copy sent to NEH?: No
"A World of Curated Knowledge: Leveraging the wider semantic web to enhance library discovery" (Book Section)Title: "A World of Curated Knowledge: Leveraging the wider semantic web to enhance library discovery"
Author: Carl Stahmer
Editor: Simon McLeish
Abstract: Project Associate Director Carl Stahmer published "A World of Curated Knowledge: Leveraging the wider semantic web to enhance library discovery," in Linked Data and Discovery, edited by Simon McLeish (forthcoming, Facet Publishing, 2019).
Year: 2019
Access Model: Book for purchase
Book Title: Linked Data and Discovery
"The Memory of Ballads" (Article)Title: "The Memory of Ballads"
Author: Katie Adkison
Abstract: Project Manager Katie Adkison published "The Memory of Ballads," a review of The Ballad and Its Pasts and Singing the News, in Huntington Library Quarterly, forthcoming 2019.
Year: 2019
Access Model: Subrscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Huntington Library Quarterly
Publisher: Huntington Library Quarterly
Invited speaker (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Invited speaker
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: Dr. Fumerton was an invited speaker to a conference on broadside ballads in the Czech Republic.
Date: 9/20/2019
Conference Name: Broadside Ballads in the Czech Republic
"Some Other Note: The Lost Songs of English Renaissance Comedy," (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: "Some Other Note: The Lost Songs of English Renaissance Comedy,"
Author: Ross Duffin
Abstract: Project Director Patricia Fumerton organized a seminar by Ross Duffin.
Date Range: 1/13/2020
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
"Broadside Ballads and Rejigging Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale" (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: "Broadside Ballads and Rejigging Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale"
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: A paper for the seminar "Shakespeare, Music, and Dance" for the Shakespeare Association of America.
Date: 4/17/2020
Conference Name: Shakespeare Association of America
Some Uses of Print: An Ephemeral Bifocal Vision (Book)Title: Some Uses of Print: An Ephemeral Bifocal Vision
Editor: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: This book is forthcoming; no abstract is available at this time.
Year: 2021
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Type: Edited Volume
Copy sent to NEH?: No
"British Broadside Ballads" (Book Section)Title: "British Broadside Ballads"
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Editor: Kirsteen MacKensie
Abstract: This chapter is forthcoming; no abstract is available yet.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Print Culture and Communication in the Stuart World
Czech Broadside Ballads as Multimedia Text, Art, Song, and Popular Culture, c. 1600-1900 (Book)Title: Czech Broadside Ballads as Multimedia Text, Art, Song, and Popular Culture, c. 1600-1900
Editor: Patricia Fumerton
Editor: Pavel Kosek
Editor: Marie Hanzelková
Abstract: This collection is forthcoming; no abstract is available yet.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Type: Edited Volume
Copy sent to NEH?: No
“Broadside Ballads and Rejigging Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “Broadside Ballads and Rejigging Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale”
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: A lecture for the session "Shakespeare, Music, and Dance"
Date: 04/17/2021
Conference Name: Shakespeare Association of America
The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: Patricia Fumerton presented a talk on her newest monograph.
Date: 05/28/2021
Conference Name: A Conversation on Print Culture, Featuring Hilary Bernstein and Patricia Fumerton
Symposium on Ballads from the Czech Republic (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Symposium on Ballads from the Czech Republic
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: Project Director Patricia Fumerton led a symposium on archiving ballads in the Czech Republic in conjunction with her work with scholars their on their own historical ballads.
Date Range: October 2021
Location: Brno, Czech Republic