In a marriage of literary history and 21st-century technology, the Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has established the English Ballad Archive, a collection of English broadside ballads posted on the Internet in their original format. The ballads, which number in the thousands and date back to the 16th century, are rhymed accounts of sensational news events and satisfied the public’s hunger for news and gossip in much the same way that tabloid magazines and newspapers do today.
With a $325,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Early Modern Center, a research unit within the Department of English, has, as its first project, cataloged and posted detailed facsimile transcriptions of more than 1,800 ballads in the Samuel Pepys collection (http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project). The collection dates to the 17th century and resides permanently in the Pepys Library at Magdelene College in Cambridge, England. Eventually, the English Ballad Archive will include all extant ballads from about 1500 to 1800.
Direct to Early Modern Center: English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800
Source: University of California, Santa Barbara (via AScribe)
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on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, History, Preservation/Conservation, Resources for Educators, Source File.
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