So you're going to be sitting his eye, then I'll sit.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi.
Hello.
How are you?
Hello.
and just read and try to look at you a little bit.
The study that we're presenting today is a pilot study for developing our annotation
and testing our – no, sorry, started in the middle.
This paper falls into three parts, and we'll each present one section.
And I'll start by introducing our long-term project called the Gatekeepers of Knowledge
before explaining the purpose and aims of this current study on Culpeper title pages.
Our background is in historical corpus linguistics and historical pragmatics.
We've all been members for a very, very long time in a project that's compiled medical
corpora of early medical texts.
And in this process, we've come to realize that corpus linguists have a blind spot.
If they only look at the text as they're presented in their own corpora, they lose
information that is potentially valuable, because this is not the same thing as this.
The problem, of course, is that you can't do corpus linguistic searches of this.
And that's how you end up with corpus texts.
But the illustrations, the layout, and the typography of this page all contribute to
how a reader understands and interprets this text.
And especially in our own field of historical pragmatics, where context has a large role
in explaining language use, taking these kinds of features into account can be very useful.
So our project annotates these features into the existing corpus of early modern English
medical texts so that the role of these visual features in textual communication can also
be assessed and aims to answer questions such as what visual features were used for highlighting
and emphasizing.
Are they connected to certain genres or audiences or printing houses?
And what do they tell us about the priorities, the sales arguments, and audience considerations
of the people we call the gatekeepers of knowledge?
That is, the printers, the publishers, and sellers, as well as the authors of early printed
medical texts in England in the period 1500 to 1700.
So the project combines historical corpus linguistics and book history.
Book history gives us the necessary background information about the use of, for example,
different typefaces or publishing histories of text and so on.
So book history tells us that if print publishers wanted an anatomical book to sell in the early
modern period, they needed to include illustrations copied from Vesalius like this one.
The study that we're presenting today is a pilot study for developing our annotation
scheme and for testing our hypothesis, that corpus linguistic methods can be applied to
visual features as well.
So it's not a linguistic study, but rather a book historical one.
Title pages, as you can see, can be very complex visually in the early modern period.
So if we can annotate this, the visual features here, we can annotate anything else as well.
The advertising function of title pages in the early modern period is well known.
The copies were printed for hanging in bookseller stalls or on cleft sticks and they were posted
on walls and handed out as flyers.
And in the late 17th century, nothing sold medical books like the name of Nicholas Culpepper,
a gentleman student of astronomy and physics pictured here.
He only produced a handful of works.
He had about five years of working time.
He died in 1654, only five years after his first published work, a translation of the
official London pharmacopoeia was published.
But the brand of Nicholas Culpepper was really created by the printer Peter Cole.
And it was soon picked up by other publishers and printers.
And Culpepper's works were reprinted several times, but his name was also attached to text
that had nothing to do with him.
And Culpepper's widow claimed that the printer Peter Cole had 17 of Culpepper's texts in
his possession and she herself another 79 when he died.
This is great potential for claiming to have text or printing text that had Culpepper's
name on them.
We looked at 95 title pages from the 17th century alone.
One of the aims of this study was to see if we could identify the textual and visual components
that make up the brand of Culpepper.
How was his name used on the title page to sell medical texts?
In addition, another purpose was to verify if we could see what book historians have
found out, if we'd find out the same thing with our methods.
The book historian Mary Reinlander-McArl has shown differences in the output of two big
printers of Culpepper texts.
One is slanted more towards astrological texts while the other one only produced respectable
texts.
And I put this in quotes because at the time astrology was just as respectable in its own
way.
So what we wanted to see is if this difference was also mirrored in the visual ways that
these printers used the Culpepper brand.
So Culpepper title pages are an ideal test case, not only for developing our annotation
methods, but also for testing whether we can identify patterns in visual features, the
Culpepper brand, and get the same results as Reinlander-McArl.
That is, identify different house styles.
And now I'm going to move over to Wille.
Okay.
Thank you.
So in order to apply corpus linguistic methods to visual features and explore these kinds
of questions, we need to classify and describe the features that we want to analyze and then
to represent them in a computerized form, which is, of course, what is usually referred
to as annotation.
On logically speaking, we can, for our present purposes, distinguish four different kinds
of phenomena that make up the printed page.
First of all, the textual content, its visual appearance in the case of printed books typography,
its spatial distribution on the page or its layout, and the logical and functional structure
of the text.
What should be noted is that they all have quite different topologies, while textual content
and its visual appearance are mainly linear, with some exceptions, layout operates on a
plane and the logical and functional structure is often described as loosely hierarchical.
In order to analyze the interrelationships between these different aspects of the printed
page, we need to somehow reconcile those disparate phenomena with each other and represent them
on a single analytical plane.
So what we need for the purposes of this project is an annotation system that allows us to
represent and model all four of the aforementioned aspects of the printed page and their interrelationships
in a digital form that is technically simple enough for humanists, even the famous ordinary
working linguists, to both annotate with and to run analyses on.
And finally, we need a system which does not try to reinvent the wheel but makes use of
established standards as far as they exist.
I don't think anyone here is surprised when I tell you that we're trying to fulfill this
last point by using XML and the latest TEI guidelines as the basis of our annotation.
Not just because I happen to like the TEI guidelines, but because they are the de facto standard
for this kind of stuff and they are also flexible enough to be able to fulfill that
first requirement that I mentioned.
Although not everyone agrees that XML and the TEI guidelines are easy to learn, we've
found that if we keep things simple and provide detailed instructions and documentation explaining
only the necessary bits that we use, we can get a reasonably tech-savvy humanist with
no previous experience, vanitating up and doing it with just a few days' practice.
Although extracting data for analysis still requires a basic knowledge of XSLT or some
suitable programming language, we've also found that you don't really need a degree
in computer science to be able to do this.
And the main disadvantage of XML is, as has often been pointed out, that it doesn't really
handle multiple conflicting structures all that well, but neither really does any other
solution that we've found to fulfill the other requirements, being simple enough and well-supported
enough.
And when dealing with just the four aspects that I mentioned, this is not really a serious
problem, because the fact that XML is both text-based and hierarchical in structure means
that textual content and the logical structure of the text can be represented by the XML
document as a string of character data on the one hand and by the hierarchical XML tree
on the other.
And typography, on the other hand, can easily be seen as a property of the textual content
and is thus naturally represented by attributes attached to linear segments of text, while
the layout can be seen from a text-centric point of view as a vertical stack of text
lines interspersed with empty space, and thus conveniently represented by empty elements
and some attributes.
So this way we can avoid conflicting hierarchies and still represent the interrelationships
between all the four aspects of the printed page using only very simple standard features
of XML and T guidelines, which keeps it simple to both annotate and to analyze.
Now in order to provide a practical example of how this works for title pages, I will
now quickly go through the annotation of an example case, which is a title page of the
sixth edition of Culpeper's immensely popular translation of the London Dispensatory from
1654, of which the Folger Shakespeare Library copy looks like this, as reproduced in the
early English books online.
The point of departure is the faithful representation of the textual content in the form of a graphemic
transcription, which we then annotate for the functional structure of the title page
using the structures currently suggested by the TI guidelines, although we are already
seeing the need to introduce some additions and some distinctions to them, some of which
we might even suggest as inclusions into the guidelines once we have properly tested them.
And as a result, we get a pretty standard TI representation of the logical and functional
structure of the title page.
And in addition to this basic hierarchical structure, we also annotate named entities
like personal and place names and use the role and XMLID attributes to first classify
them according to their contextual function and to link them to an entry in a database,
which we're still in the process of populating with biographical and historical information
from a variety of sources.
So far, this is what usually gets done with TI, as David Hoover mentioned in yesterday's
panel.
But for us, this structured text is just the base on which we start to add information
starting with the visual layout.
As I mentioned, the basic unit for this is a typographic line of text, which is annotated
using the line break element.
And for the horizontal aspect of layout, we use a key value pair on the rand attribute
of each structural element or a seg element if there is no suitable one in the text to
indicate the alignment of the lines contained by this segment with regard to the title block
at either left, right, centered, or justified.
Of course, we don't really need to do this for all elements.
Just define these key value pairs as inheritable and simply define a default for the whole
page and then only override it as we need to.
And to represent any deviations from this basic lineation alignment scheme, we annotate
all visually significant space, which is not considered part of the normal line or word
spacing along with any graphical elements like the horizontal lines here.
And perhaps the most significant visual aspect of the page in terms of the kinds of questions
we're looking at is its typography, which we thus try to annotate in great detail.
And in order to do this, we again use key value pairs on the rand attributes of structural
elements to separately annotate both the type family, the Roman italic black letter or small
capitals that is used, and the size of the type, which we measure as the height of the
average capital letter measured using the distinctively analog and low-tech combination
of a loop and the small ruler that you are given as a token, and rounded to the nearest
fifth of a millimeter, which we found to be a good compromise resolution that both
distinguishes between text printed using type from two different fonts, but avoids spurious
distinctions between slightly varying impressions from type of the same size.
Just as with the horizontal alignment, these key value pairs are considered inheritable,
thus we only need to annotate the default type family and size on the title page element
and for its subordinate text structural elements, and then indicate separately those bits that
deviate from these default values by using seg and high elements, the difference between
the latitude being the presence, whether there is a distinguishing highlighting function
or not.
And since the type of family and size are indicated by separate key value pairs and
are inherited independently of each other, we don't need to repeat information in the
encoding, but still preserve a record of the type family and size of every single character
on the page.
And when all of these layers of annotation are accumulated together, we get this, a detailed
yet relatively concise and simple representation of the linguistic text structural and visual
content of the title page in a structured and queryable format.
You can't really see that in there, but it's also on the back of your handout if you want
to have a look.
And this allows us not only fun things like automatically reconstructing the visual appearance
of the page using XSLT and CSS, which is very useful for proofreading not only the text,
but also the annotation describing the layout and with the ability to, for example, dynamically
highlight things like proper names and build all kinds of interactive interfaces.
But more importantly, it allows us to do corpus searches for any combination of visual features
and text and to do various kinds of calculations on the proportions and frequencies of these
visual features on different title pages, of which Yoko will now show you some examples.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
So I'm going to have to be very quick about this.
And this is sort of early days with the analysis, but here's what we have so far.
I'm going to start off by giving you a little idea of the timeline.
Some important dates there, first of all, to repeat what Kova said.
Nicholas Kupapa died in 1654 at the age of 38.
And his principal publisher, Peter Cole, died ten years later.
And as you can see from the graph, most of the titles printed before that date were printed
by Peter Cole.
And he really establishes the persona of Nicholas Kupapa, the one that then goes on
to sell books for a couple of hundred years.
The titles go from Peter Cole to John Streeter, then to George Sawbridge, and then to Hannah
Sawbridge.
And these guys form the sort of the main line, main track of Kupapa publishing.
There's also the other line headed by Nathaniel Brooks and Abdiah Braggrave.
And these guys are, on the one hand, printing astrological works, but on the other, they
start printing other works as well, works that have absolutely nothing to do with the
real Kupapa.
They just use the title.
Thank you.
Jesus.
So here we go.
As Carl also said, Nicholas Kupapa was sort of a magic name in those days.
He put his name on the title, and it sold books.
So what was going on?
Well, first of all, Nicholas Kupapa was, as I said, sort of a persona in those days.
And this was created by Peter Cole.
So the first thing that's apparent in pretty much all the title pages is these idiosyncratic
spelling of his name, Nick Kupapa, N-I-C-H period, Kupapa, and the style, gentleman,
student of physical astrology, gentleman because he was one, and that was very important to
him personally, but also as something that sort of adds emphasis to his person, because
he was not a doctor, but he was writing medical works all the time.
So what about printing house styles, and what can we do with the annotations?
What can we pull out from the corpus?
Can style or can title pages reveal something about printer's motives?
Well, first of all, if we look at the use of type on those title pages, we can see that
the fewest number that we find on a single title page is five different types.
That's a combination of a type family and a size.
The largest is 17.
Most printers, the legitimate printers belonging to the main track, use about nine, ten types
per page.
The less legitimate printers, the mercenary printers, are used more.
They go with 13, 14, 15.
They go for the visual impact, and as we'll see, they also emphasize Kupapa's name on
the title page.
If we look at the proportional size of Kupapa's name, the size of the type used for printing
Kupapa's name, and relate that to the mean type size on the page, you can see that the
main track are pretty conservative.
They're printing Kupapa's name in pretty much the same size as all the other tags on the
page, or the average size of the type on the page.
The other printers, Blackgrave in particular, tend to use a larger type.
They emphasize Kupapa's name, and particularly in works that have nothing to do with Kupapa.
The less original content from Kupapa that is on the page, the more they emphasize his
name in order to use it for selling the books.
Here's another representation, so you can see how the mercenary publishers actually
put more emphasis on Kupapa's name on those title pages.
Here's an example, Kupapa's Last Legacy, a book never written by Kupapa, but marketed
as such.
You can see that the Kupapa's name is emphasized in two places on that page.
The information really comes from the annotation then.
You can also see some claims of newly discovered content.
The book was printed more than 20 years after his death, and they seem to be discovering
more and more content by Kupapa every time they print the book.
If we look at the length of the specific title pages, we can see that the mercenary publishers
are again at work.
While the legitimate printers of Kupapa's titles pretty much stick to the same length
of title pages, the same amount of text on the title page, the mercenary printers add
to the length to the pages all the time, because they're adding more content.
Because newly discovered this, newly discovered that.
We can do more, and this is something that we're starting to do now.
We can develop these type profiles for individual works, and of course, thereby, for individual
printers.
Here we have the 13 editions of the Famicapel Rondenensis, or the Additional Dispensatory,
where we have the 47 different types used in those 13 titles.
Of course, this allows us to do things like principal components analysis, where we can
see that certain editions printed close to each other by Peter Cole tend to use the same
typesets.
But then we find outliers, if you like, where something's going on.
These can be quite interesting, because they might not correspond with what we might expect.
Here, for example, we have the 59 edition and the 55 edition, which look to the naked
eye pretty much the same, but in fact, they only share one single type, the 3mm Roman.
This is not to be taken, these title pages are different as such, but they use a different
type family.
This allows us to identify things like printing house practices, the availability of a particular
type to individual printers, and so forth.
This might be a case, for example, of the book being outsourced to another printer,
a so-called shared printing.
The printing was actually not done by Peter Cole, but it was commissioned by him and
has his title on the page anyway.
We can also do other things with printing house styles.
Here we see the introduction of Brackletter by John Streeter, which was then picked up
by the Sawbridges.
On the other hand, Nathaniel Brooks and the people that followed him tended to go with
smallcaps.
Again, this allows us to look at changes in the way printers use his name.
To recap, there's some features on Culpepper Books that always re-occur.
The Frontispiece portrait is really important, everybody's using it, the quality varies,
but there's always usually a Frontispiece portrait of Culpepper himself with the same
elements.
There's always the same styling, more or less, the Nick Culpepper gentleman student, it might
be a late student at some point, but the styling is the same, the persona is the same from
book to book to book.
Then there are the differences as well.
This is where we see the difference between the mercenary printers who didn't have a proper
claim to Culpepper titles.
They go with a larger type for Culpepper's name, they go with a higher number of different
types on the title page, they increase the length of the title pages more than the other
printers, and they cite Culpepper as an authority, which the others never do.
They only give him as an author or not, but the others have all kinds of different claims
of Culpepper being an important person to a particular book.
As I said, this is earlier days in the study, and obviously this is a pilot study, so we're
looking at Culpepper now because he's a very well-known figure and we can cross-reference
this with what's already known about Culpepper, and this seems to play out.
But obviously the larger plan is to really go with the whole corpus and start looking
at broader developments in medical writing.
So thanks a lot.