Presentation on Ballad Sheet Forensics at the Huntington Library

Attached are the slides from my recent talk, “Ballad Sheet Forensics, Preservation, and the Digital Archive,” the final presentation at the Huntington Library's Living English Broadside Ballads conference, April 4-5, 2014. The talk focused on the need to reconsider our understanding of what constitutes the “information” that we are trying to capture and/or preserve through acts of digitization. By way of example, it demonstrated a variety of imaging techniques that capture images meant for a machine rather than human reader. These images capture and reveal data that allows the digital humanist, working with a collection of existing pattern recognition, image comparison, and data analysis algorithms to answer questions of high scholarly value, such as, for example, the dating of print works based upon an analysis of physical sorts used in printing and the migration of individual elements in the printing form over multiple print runs.