University of Helsinki
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Printers
- Methods & Materials
- Case Studies
- Visualisations
- Reflection
- Conclusion
- Division of Labour and Reflection on Learning
- References
Conclusion
Throughout this project we looked into a way of conducting research that is gaining popularity – using online repositories to study the images depicted in books based on computational, and at times further qualitative methods. Our project focused on the printing culture of 18th century Britain and Ireland, which we studied iteratively via decorated initials found in the ECCO database. We used the work of COMHIS researchers who helped us cluster the DIs with a few different models and annotated the results to end up with non-duplicated clean clusters. These clustered DIs combined with earlier work acted as a starting point for us to look into the printing culture of the period of interest.
We discovered that closely examining the initials is useful to uncover possible leads that are likely to help with understanding the relations between different printers further. Such was the case with the London printer William Bowyer whose DIs seem to appear in slightly altered versions in the Dublin counterparts printed by George Grierson. Similarly, by following the connections from Samuel Richardson’s DI and its near identical counterpart, we were once again led back to Bowyer, and reminded that multiple printers can use the same sets of DIs. Graph-based analysis enabled us to see that the typographic trends within the genres are different. Besides that we discovered that the typographic elements across different modules had distinctive usage patterns of specific letters, and across the genre modules Richardon’s letters were used more consistently than Bowyer’s. Also, most of the modules showed a decreasing trend in the usage of decorative initials throughout time.
Through such work consisting of manual comparison, reading prior research, and using computational methods we can gain a better understanding of how printing culture spread and evolved across different regions and periods. It also provides us the opportunity to observe the connectivity of printers and their use of decorative initials. This project offered us a valuable opportunity to explore the hidden layers of history and to open up new perspectives on 18th-century publishing practices and printing techniques, which can be further researched in various ways.