Search results for "History of the book"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
London Impressions d’Alice Meynell et William Hyde (1898) : fabrique du livre et connectivité
2021
At a time when print was being challenged by new media that dematerialized information flows, the illustrated book London Impressions reflected an ideal of connectivity. A folio published by Constable in 1898, it gathered essays by Alice Meynell and photogravures and etchings by the English artist William Hyde. This article explores the editorial strategy that provided a record of fin-de-siècle urban modernity and aimed to guarantee the sustainability of the book as medium of inscription and transmission in a changing market. It contextualizes the way Hyde’s images were manufactured and tackles the material and medial notion of connectivity from the perspective of ecocriticism and media arc…
New Approaches to OCR for Early Printed Books
2020
Books printed before 1800 present major problems for OCR. One of the main obstacles is the lack of diversity of historical fonts in training data. The OCR-D project, consisting of book historians and computer scientists, aims to address this deficiency by focussing on three major issues. Our first target was to create a tool that identifies font groups automatically in images of historical documents. We concentrated on Gothic font groups that were commonly used in German texts printed in the 15th and 16th century: the well-known Fraktur and the lesser known Bastarda, Rotunda, Textura und Schwabacher. The tool was trained with 35,000 images and reaches an accuracy level of 98%. It can not on…
Tall Tales for a Mass Audience: Dutch Penny Prints and Spanish Aleluyas in Comparative Perspective
2021
Abstract In this article we compare Dutch penny prints with Spanish Aleluyas, focusing on three specific functions of this premodern mass medium: popularising and adapting theatre plays; standardising (folk/fairy) tales; adapting and popularising literary classics. Via these functions we address the discrepancies between the two countries considering the materiality of the penny prints, the growth of the production, but also the transition from a predominantly religious, towards a more profane content. Striking was the lack of educative and edifying initiatives in Spain in contrast to the Dutch ideological strategies. We observed some interesting similarities as well. Although in both count…