Broadside Ballads

English Broadside Ballad Archive

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a project of the Early Modern Department of the University of California Santa Barbara's English department. The project was started in 2003 when EBBA Director Patricia Fumerton noted the lack of access to broadside ballad resources as she researched street literature. The archive contains 9359 early modern broadside ballads and is free to access.

Features

Search

The archive has an advanced search feature that allows users to search for ballads by many features.

by Feature

Title
Text
Date
Author
Imprint
Publishing Information
ETSC Number
Collection

by Keyword

The advanced search section has a list of keywords describing a variety of topics, styles, and themes. Users can select one or more of these search criteria when conducting a search, limiting their search to ballads that focus contain these elements.

by Music and Recording Information

Users can search for ballads by the tune title on the ballad itself or with the standardized tune title (provided by Claude Simpson in The British Broadside Ballad and its Music).

This feature also allows users to limit resutls to ballads that have a recording.

by Woodcut Images

Users can also search by the woodcut images that accompany the ballads. On the homepage, there is an option to upload images that the archive's recognition software can match with woodcut images used in ballads.

There is also an option in the advanced search tab that allows users to select from a list of impression keywords. This option allows users to find images that match a certain topic. However, this feature is limited to impressions in the Pepys Collection.

Ballad Exploration Tabs

Citation

This section contains general information about the ballad being observed. It includes the ballad's:

Title
Date of Publishing
Author
Standard Tune
Imprint
License
Collection
Page
Location and Shelfmark
ETSC ID
Keyword and Pepys Categories
Tune Imprint
First Lines
Refrain
Album Page
Physical Condition
Ornament

Album Facsimile

This tab shows an image of the ballad in the context of the book or collection that it is kept in.

Ballad Sheet Facsimile

This section contains an image of the original ballad. It allows users to zoom in or out on the image.

Facsimile Transcription

This section contains an image that shows the original arrangement of the images and text for a ballad, but with the text retyped to allow for easier reading.

Text Transcription

The text of the ballad is typed out in plain text.

Music

This section contains information about the musical aspect of the ballads. It gives the standard tune title and tune imprint. This information can be used in the search section to find ballads to the same tune. If available, this page also has a recording of the ballad being performed to its tune. This file is available for download.

Woodcuts

This section contains information above the woodcut images in the ballad. EBBA describes these images as " an often overlooked, but nonetheless defining feature of early modern English ballads."

This page shows all the images in the selected ballad. The images are categorized based on the presence of figures, natural things, and architecture, as well as the fashion in the image. The page also displays similar or identical images from other ballads using a software called Archive-vision. This feature allows users to navigate between different ballads with shared or similar images.

Text Mining

This section contains a few tools to analyze the composition of the text of the ballad.

Word Frequency Cloud

This feature displays all of the words present in the ballad. Words that appear larger are used more times in the text.

TFIDF Word Cloud

Similar to the word frequency cloud, this feature displays all of the words present in the ballad with more frequently used words in a larger font. However, this tool also factors in the prevalence of words in other texts; words that are frequently used in many texts will not be as large, so common words like "and," "I," and "the" will not be as prominent in the word cloud.

Document Topics Histogram

This feature displays the relative frequency of words in different latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topics appear in the text.

Bigram

This feature displays a word association network of the words in the ballad. Words that are associated more frequently are connected by more opaque lines.

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Ballad Sources

Pepys Collection: a collection of ballads left to Magdalene College of Cambridge University by Samuel Pepys
Roxburghe Collection: a collection of about 1500 ballads held by the British library
Crawford Collection: a collection of ballads collected by Ludovic Crawford and held by the National Library of Scotland
Euing Collection: a collection of 42 black-letter ballads held in the University of Glasgow Library
Houghton Collections: a collection of almost 1,150 ballads held by the Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard University

This list is not exhaustive. EBBA has archived ballads from many other collections and continues to seek out broadside ballads in collections around the world. More information can be found here.