Noting the tunes of seventeenth-century broadside ballads : The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu, hosted at the University of California-Santa Barbara, was founded in 2003 to render pre-1700 English broadside ballads fully accessible as texts, art, songs, and cultural records. EBBA focuses especially on the broadside ballads of the seventeenth century because that period was the "heyday" of the genre.1 In their heyday, ballads were printed on one side of large sheets of paper (hence "broad"-side) mostly in swirling, decorative, black-letter (or what we today call "Gothic") typeface, embellished with many woodcuts and other ornamentation, and labeled with a tune title printed just below the song title. These alluring multimedia artifacts addressed multifarious topics--often from more than one perspective--to catch the interest of a wide audience.2Not

English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA): "Ballad Illustration 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

Noting the Tunes of Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballads: The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)

This essay focuses on the ways a digital archive of printed, pre-1701 English broadside ballads facilitates and complicates the orality that folklorists have traditionally seen in opposition to print. The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) recaptures the multi-media nature of early broadside ballads—as text, art, and song—providing recordings of all extant tunes for the printed ballads and, in doing so, capturing the ease and difficulties of matching text to tune