Extending the Life of the Broadside Ballad: The English Broadside Ballad Archive from Microfilm to Color Photography

Extending the Life of the Broadside Ballad: The English Broadside Ballad Archive from Microfilm to Color Photography
Becker, Charlotte, University of California, Santa Barbara, becker.charlotte@gmail.com
Meyer, Shannon, University of California, Santa Barbara, meyer.shannon@gmail.com
The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a digital archive housed in the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara (http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu), under the direction of Professor Patricia Fumerton, and with funding from three NEH Reference Materials Grants (2006-8, 2008-10, and 2010-12). English broadside ballads were mass printed from the sixteenth through the ninenteenth century; in their “heyday” of the seventeenth century, they were multimedia productions that included woodcut images, a poem, and the title of a popular tune, to which the poem could be sung. The goal of the EBBA project is to recreate for users the lively interaction with these multimedia artifacts that approximates how early modern people might have encountered them at the height of their popularity. The EBBA archive is especially important because the surviving artifacts are extremely fragile and in most cases inaccessible to scholars, let alone the general public. The EBBA website provides facsimile images of the broadsides as they would have appeared when printed, transcriptions of the poem, facsimile transcriptions displaying the poem in the context of the original broadside but rendered in modern type, and audio recordings of the ballads being sung. Thanks to color images of ballad collections that EBBA has acquired during the past year, the EBBA team has begun to add another layer to the archive: now, in addition to reflecting the early modern experience with the ballads, EBBA can display the ballads as they appear in collections today.

We propose a multimedia poster presentation demonstrating the long-standing features of EBBA, and highlighting our recent acquisition of color images of the Roxburghe ballad collection through a contract with the British Library. At the British Library, the albums that comprise the Roxburghe collection are not made available to the public or even to most scholars because of their fragile condition; however, the texts in the collection remain highly important to scholars because they offer particular insight into early modern popular culture and demonstrate developments in print culture over the three centuries during which the collected ballads were printed and circulated. EBBA’s acquisition, manipulation, and mounting of the Roxburghe color images is exciting and challenging from both the user and developer points of view, and will be the focus of our presentation.

For scholarly users of the site, these photographs are important because they show the results of the collection process. In the case of the Roxburghe collection, this process often involved cutting broadsheets in half and pasting the halves into albums, with the two sides of the ballad either on facing pages or one side above the other on a single page. Sometimes ballads were pasted sideways into the album, uncut and folded at the edges to fit inside the closed album. EBBA has previously, for the collection of Pepys ballads, offered microfilm-based black and white images (called “ballad facsimiles” on our site) to simulate the appearance of the original whole broadside. But adding color images and “album facsimiles,” as in the case of the Roxburghe collection, helps EBBA give users a better sense of the long life and changing cultural contexts of broadside ballads. One aspect of this long life is the handwritten emendations made by collectors and overzealous antiquarians. Whether commentary or additions that assist in reading the ballad, these emendations are an essential part of understanding the reception and use of the artifacts over time. EBBA’s text transcription rules are geared toward providing a searchable, readable text of each ballad as it was originally printed, yet the EBBA team wanted to ensure that the prolific and often illuminating handwriting in the Roxburghe collection could be accessed by users. The color images capture the physical object in great detail, rendering the handwriting entirely visible and accessible to scholars wishing to read it; thus, users can now see this important feature of the Roxburge ballads for themselves.

As our presentation will show, these color images have been a unique opportunity for the EBBA team to think about our responsibility to present these artifacts in a way that balances scholarly utility, visual fidelity, and the EBBA site’s technical capability. The British Library’s “Turning the Pages” software and Virtual Books webpage is a well-known example of the kind of virtual access to textual artifacts that we aim to provide; however, the nature of the Roxburghe albums makes such a presentation particularly challenging. We are dealing with albums where the ballads were arranged in unpredictable ways when collected, where page discoloration makes aesthetic uniformity difficult to achieve, and where parts of the ballads are often obscured or distorted by folding or insertion in the albums’ gutter. In addition to finding ways to account for these visual aberrations, the EBBA team spent a great deal of time deliberating over optimal file size for image delivery and attempting to find the most advantageous balance between server speed and image detail. These practices and decisions are crucial ones as EBBA continues to acquire color images of other ballads, including the Euing collection from the University of Glasgow, and the Britwell ballads from the Huntington Library.

Given the irregular and sometimes haphazard nature of ballad collection, decisions such as these will continue to face the EBBA team as the project moves forward with these and hopefully other extant collections in the future. We are excited to share EBBA’s progress, as well as our dynamic process of decision making, as we continue to make early modern broadside ballads available to the public.