Clowne. What hast heere? Ballads?
Mopsa. Pray now buy some: I loue a ballet in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true.
Autolicus. Here’s one, to a very dolefull tune, how a Vsurers wife was brought to bed of twenty money baggs at a burthen, and how she long’d to eate Adders heads, and Toads carbonado’d.
Mopsa. Is it true, thinke you?
Autolicus. Very true, and but a moneth old.
William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (1609)
Broadside ballads, single-sided printed pages with woodcut illustrations, a poem and the name of the tune that a singer could fit to the lyrics, conveyed the seventeenth-century-equivalent of today’s viral memes. Ballads were written, sung and printed to publish news, to retell historical events and stories, to report crimes, to celebrate courtship and love and to wonder at natural and supernatural phenomena. The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a project to digitize all known seventeenth-century broadside ballads. In progress since 2003, EBBA is an exemplary digital humanities project that models digital sustainability and ambition in recreating and preserving musical knowledge for future generations.
As of July 2017, the archive included scans of 7,859 ballads, 74.85% of currently identified extant ballads, digitized from collections including the Pepys Collection at Magdalene College, the Roxburghe Ballads held at the British Library and collections from the University of Glasgow, the Huntington Library, the National Library of Scotland and Harvard University’s Houghton Library. For those interested in a comprehensive search of ballads including earlier and later centuries, the collection is also searchable via the Bodleian Library’s Broadside Ballads Online (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/), which encompasses both EBBA data and broadsides scanned from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library collection. This is possible thanks to EBBA’s attention to ensuring files and metadata conform to the standards of the TEI and other digital best practices.
Because ballads were intended to be sung to well-known tunes, this project has created recordings for ballads where tunes are known. Details of the recording project are documented in an essay by James Revell Carr on the site. MP3 recordings may be played or downloaded, and Flash and Media Player options are available for in-browser use. Singers drawn from the UCSB student body and community bring a range of background and experience – per Carr, “some from conservatory backgrounds, some from folk music scenes, and yet others who work with groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism – and each has brought their own personality to the ballads they sing”.
The digitized images themselves often appear in two formats, the Ballad Sheet Facsimile and the Album Facsimile. It was common for collectors to cut apart ballads and paste them into albums. When the only source of a ballad sheet is from an album, EBBA researchers have used Adobe Photoshop to recreate original margins and layout following a protocol described on the site; the Album Facsimile image documents the original source as it was placed by the collector.
Transcriptions appear in two formats as well. A double-keyed text transcription presents an accurate representation of the ballad’s text, again following a clearly documented protocol for modernization; that transcript is then placed in a second document that reproduces the ballad sheet’s images and follows the format of the broadside. This makes the experience of examining a broadside accessible to modern readers who might struggle to interpret black letter type and allows any broadside to be printed on standard 8 ½ × 11 paper for classroom instruction use.
Each ballad is fully cited and catalogued – TEI-XML and MARC files are available on the site for each entry – and cataloguing standards have been developed in collaboration with the English Short Title Catalogue, the definitive reference for published documents from the time period. The citations include subject indexing using a standardized keyword list, and in the case of the Pepys collection, Samuel Pepys’ original indexing is preserved as well. The Advanced Search form facilitates searches by controlled vocabulary term or Pepys indexing, by metadata fields like tune, title, author and first line and by license and imprint. One important and possibly unique feature is the ability to search descriptions of the woodcut images to trace how illustrations on particular themes had been repurposed across many ballad printings.
The subjects that can be explored using broadsides are nearly limitless, and students of music, poetry, history, communications and business will all find a rich repository of the popular culture that captivated British people from all walks of life in the seventeenth century. Digital humanists can look toward this collection as one that sets out to improve the accessibility of a genre of print collections for teaching, research and even present-day popular entertainment – the project’s blog, highlighted on the home page, features entries highlighting ballads on themes from television series Game of Thrones, House of Cards and The Walking Dead.
Best of all, this cultural heritage collection is free to any user, thanks to Collections and Resources grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant and Faculty Research Grants and Instructional Improvement Grants from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and support from Making Publics, UT Dallas, University of Arkansas Little Rock, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
