English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA): "Ballad Illustration Archive"

FAIN: HD-51581-12

University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)
Patricia Fumerton (Project Director: October 2011 to November 2014)
Carl G. Stahmer (Co Project Director: December 2013 to November 2014)

The adaptation of image-oriented computer vision software in order to facilitate more effective cataloging and discovery of similar but distinct illustrations found within the English Broadside Ballad Archive.

Focusing on the expansive English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu, containing over 2,000 distinct 17th-century woodcut illustrations, our proposed Ballad Illustration Archive (BIA) will allow unprecedented access to these hard-to-access images that are important cultural and artistic productions. Our project will make significant technological inroads through innovative integration of computer vision software and human cataloguing, delivering to the end-user a product which is technically cutting-edge and marked by careful scholarship. It will thus enable enhanced research in multiple humanities disciplines and also make these compelling images available to the interested non-specialist public. Ultimately, we see this project expanding to include a wider variety of early modern illustrations; we also expect it to expand the possibilities for future digital scholarship.

Media Coverage

The Word on the Street: UC Santa Barbara's English Broadside Ballad Archive (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Eileen Conrad
Publication: UC Santa Barbara Today
Date: 10/1/2011
Abstract: The English Broadside Ballad Archive makes Renaissance street literature, a popular form of communication somewhat akin to the National Enquirer, accessible for the first time.
URL: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/ucsbtoday/fall2011.pdf

Associated Products

Execution Ballads (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Execution Ballads
Writer: Una McIlvenna
Director: Robyn Johnston
Producer: Robyn Johnston
Abstract: This truly gruesome program explores the phenomenon of the execution ballad—the printed pamphlet telling, in song, the story of the crime and of the condemned. These songs tell of the descent into vice, give account of the crime in all its appalling detail and purport to give voice to the true repentance of the doomed sinner. In what was a profitable line of business for early printers, the songs were declaimed by the ballad seller and spruiked to the crowd who’d gathered to see the offender put to death.
Date: 12/15/2012
Primary URL: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/a-woeful-sinner27s-fall/4415196#transcript
Format: Radio

Samuel Pepys and the Making of Ballad Publics: Song, Performance, Identity (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Samuel Pepys and the Making of Ballad Publics: Song, Performance, Identity
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: N/A
Date: 11/13/2012
Conference Name: The Huntington Library

Samuel Pepys and the Making of Ballad Publics: Song, Performance, Identity (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Samuel Pepys and the Making of Ballad Publics: Song, Performance, Identity
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: N/A
Date: 10/17/2012
Conference Name: Identities, Intertextuality, and Performance in Song Culture (c. 1500 – c. 1800)

Samuel Pepys and the Making of Ballad Publics (Book Section)
Title: Samuel Pepys and the Making of Ballad Publics
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: Drawing especially on the everyday details about the circulation of broadside ballads as narrated in Samuel Pepys’s diary, 1660–1669, this essay explores the makings of ballad publics in seventeenth-century England. By ‘publics’ I refer to unofficial and free forms of association based on a shared, if sometimes only roughly articulated agenda, before the rise around 1700 of what has been come to be known as the Habermasian ‘public sphere’. As Leslie P. Cormack summarizes, we must think of pre-Habermasian publics not along his model of a strictly unified (male) middle class engaged in political critique of its aristocracy but, in a less constrained way: as ‘a loose collection of people, not all of whom have personal knowledge of one another, connected by a common interest in a particular subject and with some social or political goal in mind’. By virtue of their being publics, not the public, I would add, such informal assemblages are multiple and always in the making (meaning that they can emerge and die out in an organic way). They are also capable of being stronger or weaker depending on the particular persons or circumstances or time periods involved. With this liberal definition in mind, my essay will track the making of multiple seventeenth-century English ballad publics that emerge out a shared cultural understanding across classes of the nature and function of broadside ballads. It concludes with the idea that a ballad public – or pluralistically conceived, ballad publics – consists of encircling spheres wherein strength lies closest to the center but can also arise and decrease anywhere, in any encircling sphere, on the spur of the moment.
Year: 2014
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Identities, Intertextuality and Performance in Song Culture (c. 1500 – c. 1800)

Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings (Book)
Title: Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Author: Eric Nebeker
Author: Kris McAbee
Author: Jessica C. Murphy
Author: Paxton Hehmeyer
Author: William Gahan
Author: James Revell Carr
Author: Gerald Egan
Author: Simone Chess
Author: Tassie Gniady
Author: Laura Miller
Editor: Patricia Fumerton
Abstract: Includes 155 selected ballads, presented in modern fonts, but laid out as they were originally, including original artwork (woodcuts). The recordings are of mostly unaccompanied individual singers (men and women).
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/broadside-ballads-from-the-pepys-collection-a-selection-of-texts-approaches-and-recordings/oclc/809249941&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780866984690

Digitizing Ephemera and Its Discontents: EBBA’s Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad (Book Section)
Title: Digitizing Ephemera and Its Discontents: EBBA’s Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Editor: Sally O'Driscoll
Editor: Kevin Murphy
Abstract: The book offers new perspectives on works that were central to the visual and literary culture of the Anglo-American world-ephemeral print-but which have received little scholarly attention in the past.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.bucknell.edu/script/upress/book.asp?f=s&id=1841
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Book Title: Studies in Ephemera : Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print
ISBN: 978161148494

The English Broadside Ballad Archive: From Theory to Practice (Book Section)
Title: The English Broadside Ballad Archive: From Theory to Practice
Author: Tassie Gniady
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Author: Simone Chess
Editor: Ian Frederick Moulton
Editor: Heidi Brayman Hackel
Abstract: The availability of digital editions of early modern works brings a wealth of exciting archival and primary source materials into the classroom. But electronic archives can be overwhelming and hard to use, for teachers and students alike, and digitization can distort or omit information about texts. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives places traditional and electronic archives in conversation, outlines practical methods for incorporating them into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and addresses the theoretical issues involved in studying them. The volume discusses a range of physical and virtual archives from 1473 to 1700 that are useful in the teaching of early modern literature—both major sources and rich collections that are less known (including affordable or free options for those with limited institutional resources). Although the volume focuses on English literature and culture, essays discuss a wide range of comparative approaches involving Latin, French, Spanish, German, and early American texts and explain how to incorporate visual materials, ballads, domestic treatises, atlases, music, and historical documents into the teaching of literature.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.mla.org/store/PID480
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Book Title: Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives
ISBN: 9781603291569

Collectors, Consumers, and the Making of Seventeenth-Century English Ballad Publics: From Networks to Spheres (Book Section)
Title: Collectors, Consumers, and the Making of Seventeenth-Century English Ballad Publics: From Networks to Spheres
Author: Patricia Fumerton
Editor: Paul Yachnin
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2009
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press);
Book Title: Forms of Association: Making Publics in Early Modern Europe

Arch-V: A Platform for Image-Based Search and Retrieval of Digital Archives (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Arch-V: A Platform for Image-Based Search and Retrieval of Digital Archives
Author: Carl Stahmer
Abstract: Arch-V (short for Archive Vision) is a newly developed C++ application that provides image based search capabilities for digital archives of print materials. In 2013 the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) at the Early Modern Center, University of California, Santa Barbara was awarded an NEH Start-Up Grant to begin work on the Ballad Impression Archive (BIA), a component of EBBA specifically devoted to cataloguing the over 9,000 (and growing) individual woodcut impressions in EBBA and making them fully searchable as an image collection. A key component of this award was the creation of software to provide automated, image based searching of the collection. The proposed short paper will introduce and provide an overview of the implementation procedures for Arch-V.
Date: 7/11/2014
Primary URL: http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-325.xml
Primary URL Description: Overview and Methodology of the paper.
Conference Name: DH2014

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