These posts record the implementation of digital methods for cataloguing illustrations, implemented for the 2011-2014 project ‘Integrated Broadside Ballads Online’, based at the Bodleian Libraries. Redevelopment of the site is required in 2025 and links to the ballad items will be restored when that is complete.
ImageMatch
Posted on 11 November 2014 by Giles Bergel
The Bodleian ballads team are proud to present an initial release of ImageBrowse, a further development by Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group of their pioneering ImageMatch printed image-recognition system. The original ImageMatch tool was created as part of a collaboration between Dr. Giles Bergel (University of Oxford, English Faculty), Visual Geometry and the Bodleian Libraries: see an earlier post for ImageMatch’s full history. ImageBrowse is described in an award-winning research poster by DPhil. student Joon Son Chung, supervised by Dr. Relja Arandjelovic and Professor Andrew Zisserman, all based in Visual Geometry.
ImageBrowse provides a powerful analytical tool for researching ballad illustrations. Highlighting the illustrations on the ballad sheets, it allows the user to browse a gallery of woodcuts taken from some 900 of the Bodleian’s 17th-Century ballads, automatically extracted from the surrounding printed text. It was during the 17th Century that English ballads were most copiously illustrated, sometimes with the same woodblock, or a copy, but ballads of both earlier and later dates are also illustrated.
The gallery is currently organised by Subject, Block and Impression. The Subject is derived from the ICONCLASS cataloguing performed by Dr. Alexandra Franklin for the original Bodleian Ballads Database, created in 1997.
Impressions on paper have been grouped together as blocks, where there is compelling evidence that this is the case. Below, see a view of all the blocks catalogued under a particular subject.
Determining which impressions have been taken from the same block is not always easy, but is greatly aided by ImageMatch, in conjunction with the cataloguer’s experience. The best evidence comes in the form of progressive degradation to a block, shown by chips, cracks, wormholes or other areas of damage in a sequence of impression. Simply put, if the same area of damage appears on two impressions it is highly likely that both were printed from the same woodblock. If both human eye and the computer are in agreement, ImageBrowse presents a gallery of impressions taken from each block (see below and here):
ImageBrowse has two other features to aid the researcher. ‘Blocks Used Together’ presents the blocks that appear on the same ballad sheet as the selected block (below and here):
Lastly, ImageBrowse’s presents the outcome of the computer-aided cataloguer’s reasonings on the sequence of block usage. The Time Sequence Feature displays an overlay of impression images sequenced by time, which can be advanced and reversed by moving the mouse-pointer over the image from left (earliest) to right (latest). This allows the viewer to see the progression of damage to the block (both images, below, and here):
Above: number 11 out of 14 impressions. Moving the mouse pointer to the right, we can see a later impression taken from the block:
Wormholes, highlighted in pink, conclusively show the later publication of this impression – perhaps 14 out of 14 appearances in ImageBrowse.
A future post will report on the potential of this technique for a more advanced application – harnessing it with the methods of book history to improve the dating of the ballad sequence as a whole.
Also for the future: more Browse categories and the full integration of ImageBrowse into Bodleian Ballads Online
Publications:
Joon Son Chung, Relja Arandjelovic, Giles Bergel, Alexandra Franklin, and Andrew Zisserman, ‘Re-presentations of Art Collections’, Workshop on Computer Vision for Art Analysis (Visart), ECCV, 2014 [pdf]
Giles Bergel, Alexandra Franklin, Michael Heaney, Relja Arandjelovic, Andrew Zisserman and Donata Funke, ‘Content-based image recognition on printed broadside ballads: The Bodleian Libraries’ ImageMatch Tool’, Proceedings of the IFLA World Library and Information Congress, 2013 [pdf]
ImageMatch and researching ballad contexts
Posted on 8 April 2014
The following is a guest post by Dr. Anders Ingram.
The dramatic events of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) inspired a deluge of English printing from news sheets to long histories, and of course ballads. In a recent article for the Historical Journal I explore a number of English ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege, and show how contemporary commonplace images of the ‘Turk’ allowed these ballads to draw analogies between these events and English politics. My study situates these ballads within the wider milieu of pamphlet news, political polemic, and ballad publication. The Bodleian image matching tool offers a new resource for scholars seeking to contextualise the relationship between the text of a ballad and its visual illustrations by finding other examples where the same woodcut was used.
The Christian conquest ([1683]) is a black-letter Vienna ballad printed for the noted ballad partnership J. Wright, J. Clark, W. Thackery, and T. Passinger. The ballad is printed, typically for its style, in landscape orientation, with four columns of text and three garish woodcuts. Though The Christian Conquest survives only in the Roxburghe Collection in the British Library, digitised by EBBA, I had previously encountered one of the woodcuts from this ballad in the earlier black-letter ballad The Scotch Rebellion (J. Conyers, [1679]), which survives as Bodleian Douce 2(192a).
Using the ImageMatch tool I was able to identify a further use of this illustration in Bodleian Wood E25(132), a copy of News from Ostend (F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clark, [1674-1678])
ImageMatch is particularly good for comparing details of images side by side. Though The Scotch Rebellion is a notably less good quality impression, close comparison of these two woodcut images from the 1670s show wear on the block, notably a chip in frame top left (see highlight above), indicating that they may be images taken from the same woodcut block. Using the tool to compare these images to the illustration from The Christian Conquest, shows a very close match to News from Ostend, and these impressions were almost certainly taken from the same block.
The Christian Conquest also shares an image of two mounted figures which appears in Bodleian Wood E25(98), The Matchless Murder (J. Conyers, [1682]).
Again chip marks in the lower right of the frame and other details of the impression indicate that this impression is probably taken from the same block as the image from The Christian Conquest.
So what does all this tell us? News from Ostend is particularly interesting as the involvement of J. Wright and J. Clark provide a continuity to the partnership that produced The Christian Conquest. Further, though News from Ostend is essentially a love ballad, in the form of a letter from a soldier, while The Christian Conquest revels in the news of Vienna’s rescue, they both share a topical interest in military affairs on the continent. Ballad specialists such as Wright, Clark and their associates, would have owned a range of woodcuts suited to illustrating common sub-genres such as military, drinking, or love songs, and these could easily overlap. Thus though The Matchless Murder specifically describes a deadly assault by pistol wielding horsemen, a woodcut of armed horsemen was also general enough to be used in a military ballad such as The Christian Conquest.
The illustrations in The Christian Conquest relate to its military theme rather than specifically to the topic of Vienna or the Turks. The significance of these images lies in the generic form in which this ballad takes – evident in the words as well as the illustration – and the reuse of images by established ballad specialist ballad publishers, rather than their visual details.
Anders Ingram is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. This post draws on his recent article ‘The Ottoman Siege of Vienna (1683), English Ballads and the Exclusion Crisis’, The Historical Journal (2014), 57, pp 53-80
Ballads image matching demonstration: The Hague, April 12, 2013
Posted on 16 April 2013
The Bodleian Ballads image matching test site, http://imagematch.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
featured, albeit briefly, in the distinguished company of incunable woodcut illustrations at a conference, Illustrating the early printed book, celebrating the publication of Woodcuts in Incunabula Printed in the Low Countries, by Ina Kok.
The conference at the Koninklijke Bibiliotheek, The Hague, featured a host of distinguished speakers noting the importance of the study of illustration, both as art history and in support of bibliographical analysis, and the new techniques and tools available to support this, now including this detailed inventory by Dr Kok.
Image matching technology was heralded for the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich’s, newly launched portal for digitized images from special collections, http://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/, in a presentation by Bettina Wagner of the BSB.
Cristina Dondi (University of Oxford) and Clementina Piazza presented the results of Ms Piazza’s research into the woodcut borders of books published by Johannes Hamman, ‘Xylographic borders and illustrations in the editions of Hamman’s Books of Hours: study for an Incunabula image database’. In this context Alexandra Franklin demonstrated, on behalf of the Bodleian Library, the image matching applied to 17th-century broadside ballads from Bodleian collections, to show how the technology could automate the detection of matches and assist the creation of similar databases to support image-based evidence for bibliographic study.
A lecture by Giles Bergel, Relja Arandjelovic and Andrew Zisserman of the University of Oxford, explaining how the image matching software applied to the Bodleian ballads works, is available here;
http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/image-matching-printed-images-bodleian-collections-video
Image matching news spreads
Posted on 29 January 2013
Nice to see a post and link to the image matching demo on the blog Early Modern Online Bibliography.
Here’s an image generated in the course of research done for the project to test how image-matching worked on the ballad woodcuts.
Bodleian Ballads image-match
Posted on 3 December 2012
The Bodleian library is applying computer-aided image-match technology, developed by Professor Andrew Zisserman and Relja Arandjelovic of the University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science’s Visual Geometry Group, to digital images of its collections of illustrated broadside ballads. The application of image-matching technology to Bodleian ballad collections was experimentally developed under a John Fell Foundation grant awarded to Dr Giles Bergel (Oxford Faculty of English) and Dr. Richard Ovenden (Bodleian Library), with the assistance of Dr. Alexandra Franklin (Bodleian Library). High-quality (24-bit, 600 dpi) TIFF images of a sample of some of the library’s 17th-Century ballads (when the form was most copiously illustrated) were made in-house, courtesy of Bodleian Imaging Services, and indexed by the Visual Geometry Group (see here for technical description and open-source software).
The library is now integrating image-search into a redeveloped Bodleian Broadside Ballads database, launched in 1997, as part of its JISC-funded Integrating Broadside Ballads Archive Project, a collaboration with the English Broadside Ballads Archive at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The project will greatly enhance interoperability between resources for the study of English ballads and is scheduled for completion in early 2013. The automation of image-matching will improve access to Bodleian collections by helping to index illustrations in their own right.