**British Printed Images to 1700**

# March 2007 presentation

I need to start by explaining the rationale of this project. Printed
images from early modern Britain represent an identifiable and important
corpus of material, but they are currently only partially catalogued,
and are not available in a form in which they can be easily searched or
accessed. This is a shame, because they represent such a revealing and
wide-ranging genre. They range from high art to basic images, often
purely informational. They provide illustrative material on the period,
often in a very vivid way. What's more, since they were circulated at
the time, they tell us much about contemporary taste.

The British Printed Images to 1700 project has been set up to make
material of this kind more readily available. It is funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council for the period 2006 to 2009, so we are
now a third of the way through the period covered by the current grant.
The project represents a collaboration between Birkbeck, part of the
University of London, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at
King's College London, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert
Museum. The project has a website, the homepage of which I show you
here.

Currently, the website is not much more than a noticeboard, but between
now and 2009, our aim is to make available on it in searchable form the
entire holdings of pre-1700 British printed images in the Department of
Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. This is the largest single
collection of such material, comprising over 10,000 items. However,
currently these are not even properly catalogued, so our task is first
to catalogue and scan all this material and then to make it available in
an appropriately accessible form. So what I am going to do today is to
tell you what we have done so far, and what we are planning to do over
the next couple of years.

First, so that this talk is not too dryly technical, let me take you
through a few of the categories of material that will be included in our
digital library. First, there are portrait prints, the commonest type of
'loose' prints at the time. This is a print of Elizabeth I by William
Rogers, dating from the 1590s, entitled 'Rosa Electa'. The queen is
shown holding an orb and sceptre in an oval set with a border of roses
with the royal arms underneath. Then here is a portrait of her
archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, from Henry Holland's
*Heroologia* of 1620, an important book published in Holland for the
English market which includes biographies of secular and ecclesiastical
worthies of the Tudor period, with portraits of them, often (like this
one) detached. Moving forward in time, here is a portrait of Charles II
by Richard Gaywood, a rather surprising, slightly rakish image of him
evidently dating from the early years of the Restoration. And then, from
the 1680s, here is an example of a type of portrait print that became
very popular in the later years of the century, the mezzotint, in this
case a portrait of the aristocratic beauty, Diana Turnor (née Cecil),
dating from the mid 1680s, by Isaac Beckett, one of the best of the
early mezzotinters, showing her set in an elaborate landscape
background.

Then, topography. Here is one of the plates engraved for William Dugdale
and Roger Dodsworth's *Monasticon Anglicanum*, which were also issued
separately in 1656 by the engraver, Daniel King, as a volume of plates
of English cathedrals. In this case you have a view of Lichfield
cathedral. Then, here is an etching of the River Ouse at York by Francis
Place, one of the earliest English artists to produce landscapes; this
dates from around 1700, though this example is taken from a book on York
by Francis Drake published in 1736.

Moving on to other types of images, this rather striking view of a
flayed man displaying his muscles hanging from a rope is by the earliest
engraver known to have worked in England, Thomas Geminus. It is from his
English version of Vesalius' famous *De fabrica humani corporis
fabrica*, published in London in 1545. Moving on to the seventeenth
century, here is an example of a popular genre, of books of prints of
flowers and other natural history specimens, in this case by John Payne,
who worked between 1620 and 1640: these appear to have been popular
partly as pattern books for sewing. And here is something rather
different, a genre mezzotint from the late seventeenth century, in this
case again by Isaac Beckett, showing Cupid and Psyche, the former lying
naked on a bed while the latter looks down on him.

Then here are a couple of examples of a genre of which we hope to
include as many specimens as possible in our digital library, going
beyond the holdings of the British Museum if necessary, namely engraved
title pages of the period. This is William Marshall's title-page for the
1641 edition of Richard Brathwait's *English Gentleman* and *English
Gentlewoman*, which includes a whole series of emblems showing the
attributes of male and female members of the landed class which add up
to a visual exposition of gentility in the period, as is explained by
the elaborate key on the facing, folding-out page. This is the source of
the motifs that we have used on our homepage. And here is the
title-page, probably by Richard Gaywood, to the so-called *Rump Songs*
of 1662 with some powerful images of the Civil War, not least the female
preacher at the top, the Puritan and Covenanter on either side, the
scribbling Cavalier under the title and the Cavalier on horseback at the
bottom chasing devil-like figures into a pit.

Lastly, here is an example of a broadside print from the period, in this
case *Dr Panurgus,* an elaborate satire on fashionable folly and on the
way in which doctors exploited their patients. This English version
based on continental exemplars is by Martin Droeshout and evidently
dates from the 1620s, although the only extant specimen, which I show
here, dates from the 1670s and has the imprimatur of the then censor of
the Press, Sir Roger L'Estrange. This print is full of so much
fascinating detail -- some of it possibly added after Droeshout's time
-- that I cannot pause to give a full exposition of it here. However,
for this I can direct you to the section of the British Printed Images
to 1700 website called 'Print of the Month', since Dr Malcolm Jones of
the University of Sheffield is there making available the fruits of his
long-standing studies of such prints by commenting on a series of them
on a monthly basis. *Dr Panurgus* appeared in November last year, and
here is another of them, that for last September, a print of c. 1630
entitled 'A New Year's Gift for Shrews', in which a nagging wife is
ultimately chased off by the devil.

However, let me now tell you a bit about the project. As I said at the
outset, our first task is actually to create catalogue entries for the
prints involved, since hardly any exist in electronic form (and even the
hard copy catalogues are a bit archaic). Initially this is being done on
the British Museum's cataloguing system, Merlin, by the main research
assistant on the project, Stephen Pigney. At the same time, a digital
image is created, and both of these are then transferred to the British
Printed Images database. In the course of this, various changes are
made. For one thing, we wanted to add subject headings to enable people
to search for prints by topic: I'll come back to this in a moment, but
you'll see that this flowchart shows this information being inputted
separately from the process of transfer, since this information doesn't
appear in Merlin. More important, the British Museum catalogue comprises
an XML file, whereas what we needed was an export in the form of a
relational database, and for this an elaborate process of encoding had
to be carried out by our colleagues at the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities, notably Hafed Walda, resulting in a structure like this.

In addition, the British Museum catalogue is of a collection, and for
this it is necessary to have a separate record for each object. However,
for our project we are interested in prints as 'types', so if there are
two identical specimens, we want a single record covering both. At this
point we encounter a problem which the British Museum lacked, namely of
how different two prints need to be for them to have separate records,
and on the whole we are going for the different 'states' recognised by
scholars who have catalogued the work of specific artists, as with
Richard Pennington's catalogue of the engravings of Hollar, though we
may prioritise some over others on the interface through which we
present them. In addition, we felt that for our purposes different
information might need to be prominent, for instance the production
history of a print. We also felt that we needed a flexible method of
presentation so that varying amounts of information could be provided in
a single field. Some prints have very long inscriptions, for instance.

Hence we ended up with a system of tabs as shown in this entry for a
print by Francis Barlow which appeared in John Ogilby's *Aesopics* of
1668. As you see, the image together with the title and some other basic
information appears throughout, but you can scroll through a variety of
tabs in order to gain more information about the production history of
the print, its inscription, existing writings on it, and its subject
classifications. These slides give an idea of the kind of format we have
in mind, though it will clearly be refined in due course (and, on this
and all other aspects of what I am saying here about our plans, any
comments would be welcome).

I should perhaps add here that the Merlin system makes use of authority
files to give details of artists, sitters and the like. We will export
data from these, but it seemed to us best to write our own directories
of engravers, printsellers and so on, and I here show you a specimen of
the kind of thing we have in mind. They are deliberately succinct to
suit the resource's online format.

I now want to move on to the mechanism that we are planning to enable
people to locate printed images that interest them, and here is a very
basic template of what we have in mind. I will come back to this and go
through its components in a moment, but here again I emphasise that this
is very much a work in progress, and that we would welcome comments and
suggestions. In fact, here feedback is especially crucial, since, as I
will explain at the end of my talk, the hope is that the current Arts
and Humanities Research Council project focussed on the British Museum
collection might act as a prelude to the construction of an even larger
database in which all printed images were included, including the vast
quantity of book illustrations which do not happen to have been cut out
and preserved as separate prints in the British Museum. Hence not only
do we want to create a system which is robust enough for future
expansion, but we also want to feel that there is consensus support for
our method of proceeding.

It was partly to achieve such a consensus that we were anxious to take
advantage of existing expertise in the field. Hence, in the early months
of the project, in addition to consulting individuals who had been
involved in other similar enterprises, we also looked at as many
comparable websites as possible, to the number of about 30, in Britain,
the United States and Europe. Here are some search pages that we
regarded as effective and well-designed, for instance the Galaxy of
Images at the Smithsonian and Digital Gallery at the New York Public
Library. However, two search engines particularly impressed us, both in
fact from London. One was Collage from the City of London Libraries and
Guildhall Art Gallery, which impressed us for the clarity with which the
categories of searches were set out on its search page, enabling images
to be traced either by artists, people, places and date, or by a subject
classification with a comprehensive but relatively limited number of
headings. The other was Insight from the Tate Gallery, with a similarly
manageable number of categories which can then be browsed through
subject trees.

This raised the question of subject indexing, and here it seemed obvious
to look at ICONCLASS. As you are probably aware, this was developed in
the Netherlands in the post-war period by Henri van de Waal (1910-72),
whose aim was 'to devise a universal system of iconographic
classification which could accommodate all representable subjects in
Western art'. Over the past few decades, ICONCLASS has been widely
disseminated in printed and online form (here is a screen shot from its
online version), and it is generally acknowledged to have become 'the
international standard and authority for describing iconography'. There
therefore seemed strong reasons for us to adopt this, rather than to
create an idiosyncratic project-specific vocabulary of our own, which
might make it difficult to bring our collection into line with other,
similar projects.

ICONCLASS breaks up all subjects into the nine main divisions seen here,
within which the subjects are subdivided following an alphanumeric
format that allows for progressive differentiation and increasingly
specific headings. It became clear to us that the classification system
that it provides is suited to the corpus which our project will create
because of its bias towards early modern themes such as mythology and
the Bible. In addition, the numerical codes used by ICONCLASS offer the
advantage of transcending language barriers.

With this in mind we collated the subject headings of ICONCLASS, Insight
and Collage and saw that by and large there is a good deal of consensus
amongst attempts at general classification in this area. The second
column in this table is our attempt at creating subject headings for the
British Printed Images to 1700 project that would correlate with all
three, while also meeting the needs of the collection.

There are some respects in which we have slightly diverged from
ICONCLASS. Initially, we were slightly disconcerted by the rather
comprehensive nature of its 'Society, civilisation, culture' category.
However, this turns out to be less of a problem than it might at first
seem, as was pointed out to us by a colleague who had used ICONCLASS in
a similar database, Alex Franklin, who used ICONCLASS to index the
woodcut illustrations in the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads project.
As she pointed out, this is largely a presentational issue, and there is
no reason why subcategories cannot be given greater prominence within
the classification system, as shown on this chart.

On the other hand, ICONCLASS has certain complexities which we would
prefer to avoid, since these can make it seem slightly offputting to a
browser. Although we have recorded the ICONCLASS numerical codes in the
subject index that we have drawn up, we consider that for most English
speakers the verbal equivalent should receive greater prominence
(obviously, non-English speakers have the option of a search by number
only.) In addition, ICONCLASS indulges in a degree of subdivision which
may seem excessive, sometimes going through eight or nine levels before
you reach the concept you require. For instance, to reach the womb,
ICONCLASS goes through nine levels, whereas it might be felt that four
levels -- say Human being, the body, anatomy, female sexual organs -
would be more appropriate. It is also prone to subdivide images to what
might seem an excessive extent. For instance, under 11F4, the Madonna,
i.e., Mary with the Christ child, ICONCLASS has 55 variants, and I am
not sure that we will want to tabulate so much detail. It is worth
noting that both Insight and Collage have only three layers in their
subject hierarchies, evidently so as not to bewilder their users, the
only drawback about this being that this can often lead to search
results of hundreds of thumbnails. Our strategy will be to be pragmatic
on this, and to use as many levels of subdivision in any case as seem
meaningful and helpful.

Hence what we initially tried to do by way of creating a subject index
was to produce a basic hierarchy as in the slide shown here, based on
ICONCLASS headings, with three tiers in general (though extending to a
fourth one where necessary), which we envisaged would do justice to the
subjects of the prints that we wanted people to be able to locate.
Moreover, having initially done this by following and adapting
ICONCLASS, we then tested it by examining the prints in the British
Museum collection and writing subject entries for them, thus
complementing the 'top down' approach by a 'bottom up' one, which led to
a significant amount of modification to the categories that we
originally included.

However, by this time we had become aware of another factor, namely that
successful iconographic indexing requires a controlled vocabulary. This
stemmed largely from discussions with William Schupbach, Head of
Iconographic Collections at the Wellcome Library, to whom we are
grateful for this insight. What was required was a set of standardised
keywords and phrases which would allow the user to locate illustrations
matching their search terms even if they had not searched for the exact
term we were using in our subject index. In other words, we needed to
incorporate a standardised vocabulary into our subject index, the words
in which would act as access points and middlemen between the users and
the material, and we found what we required in the Library of Congress
Subject Headings, perhaps the most comprehensive standard of its kind,
which, as you will probably be aware, is just over a hundred years old.
(The list of subject headings used was first published in 1909-14, but
their incorporation into the Library of Congress catalogue went back to
1898, based on an American Library Association list published 3 years
earlier.) As you will be aware, the system was originally designed as a
controlled vocabulary for representing the subject and form of the books
and serials in the Library of Congress collection, with the purpose of
providing subject access points to the bibliographic records. In recent
years, it has increasingly been used as a tool in a number of online
bibliographic databases, and is now a recognised standard.

Hence we decided to use this resource to determine preferred subject
terms when creating subject headings for this project. For instance, if
you look up 'writers' in the Library of Congress Subject Headings, you
find that 'authors' is the preferred term, and this is what we will use,
the use of such 'controlled terms' helping not only to ensure
consistency of terminology but also to enable compatibility with other
projects around the world. On the other hand, we also need to direct
users from non-preferred terms to preferred terms, and to this end we
will create a controlled language thesaurus made up of preferred and
non-preferred terms, which will be built alongside the subject index by
handcrafting 'see' terms, particularly taking into account early modern
concepts and ideas. For example, a user searching for 'farm animals'
will automatically be directed to 'livestock' in the subject index. The
thesaurus will also have some element of customisation, including
certain headings not recognised by Library of Congress that we would
like to have in our index, and certain headings where we feel that the
preferred terms given by Library of Congress are inappropriate (though
our aim is to keep these to a minimum).

Here is a specimen of the opening entries of our subject index and
thesaurus, adapted to take account of Library of Congress preferred
usage, and with cross-references directing users from non-preferred to
preferred terms (as you will see, it also includes ICONCLASS numbers).
Then here is the page of the database giving the subject entries for the
Barlow 'Painter and the Devil' print that I showed you earlier, and here
is the project search page, which I have again already shown you, but
which I will now go through a bit more fully to indicate the kind of
searches which we hope to enable by these means. Mostly, as you see, we
expect users to descend through the subject hierarchy, but below the
list of subject headings for browsing is a keyword subject search,
allowing visitors to the site to be taken straight to 'ships', for
example, without finding their way there through the subject hierarchy.

Separate from our subject headings we would also like users to be able
to browse by various means, usually via an alphabetical list, as with
this example from Art and Architecture website. In our case, we would
have

*Producers* (with separate alphabetical lists of artists, engravers and
print dealers, similar to Collage). These will include links to the
directories that I have already referred to.

*People*: again, to be browsed via an alphabetical list. Further
subdivision may be needed, and again, links to authority files will be
included where appropriate.

*Places*: we would like users to be able to search via a geographical
hierarchy of continent, country, county and town, or via an alphabetical
list of places. Again, subject to the number of places featured in the
prints, further subdivision may be needed.

*Events*: we would like to offer a chronological list of events for
browsing. This list will be based on the images in the collection.

There will probably also be a keyword search, which would be a free text
search of all fields throughout the database (though we have not
entirely decided what to do about this). Lastly:

*Dates*: we would also like to offer dates as an available search term
to be browsed and also to restrict word searches. Alongside years and
decades, we hope to create a thesaurus linking periods, reigns and
dynasties as search terms.

'Other search options' will take visitors to a list of further search
options, for example, print technique.

As we envisage it, people will be shown the result of their search in
the form of a series of thumbnails with brief details attached.
Currently, this part of the mechanism is under development, so I cannot
show it to you. However, I can take you onto the next stage, which
involves a mechanism called a 'zoomifier', which processes each image by
dividing it into segments and enabling you to download a magnified
version of part of it in order to examine it in more detail. This saves
the need to transmit the entire image at that level of magnification,
which would put a strain on the system; it also means that you will not
be able to download the whole thing at that level of detail, which may
have advantages in protecting the copyright of the British Museum and
other holding bodies. Here is one of Francis Barlow's plates of birds
from his 1655 collection with an enlarged detail, and here is John
Droeshout's title-page to John Babington's *Pyrotechnia* (1635). Again,
this is something that we are just experimenting with, but it will give
you an idea of the kind of facilities that the British Printed Images to
1700 website will offer when it is fully operational, which we
anticipate being before the current funding ends in the spring of 2009.

Lastly, however, I want to come back to the issue of how our initial
project, largely restricted to the holdings of the British Museum, might
at a later date be extended to include all book illustrations of the
period. It is partly because I would like to see it extended in this way
that I think it is so important to achieve consensus on how images are
best located and displayed, which is why I have spent so much time going
into detail about that. Once constructed, the system we are devising
should be robust enough to be extended almost indefinitely, and
therefore all that needs to be organised is the provision of the data
that could be fed into it.

Hence my ambition is to investigate how one might go about achieving
such an extension, which will involve the following. Firstly, and most
basically, it will be necessary to locate all the images in
seventeenth-century English books (this is not necessary for those
dating from before 1603 thanks to the work of Edward Hodnett and of Ruth
Luborsky and Elizabeth Ingram). Then, one would need to devise a means
of giving each a consistent, self-contained description and devising a
subject classification for it (images would need to be retrieved
individually by subject, even though they would also want to linked
together as components of the book of which they formed part). In other
words, I think that each would require a separate entry in the database,
rather like a print in the British Museum collection. Lastly, we will
almost certainly require a newly scanned image of each of them.

Here, I am mindful that some help in this respect is available from
Early English Books Online. This has a search facility for images, which
generally errs on the side of inclusiveness, tending to include material
set out in tabular form as well as actual illustrations, though I have
occasionally known an image to be overlooked (for instance, *Rehearsall
both straung and true*, 1579). Indeed, one of the facilities that EEBO
offers is to give a list of the illustrations in a book and even to
display a whole set of thumbnails of them, as in these examples relating
to Robert Plot's *Natural History of Staffordshire* (1686). The problem
is that no assistance is given in identifying them, and hence a major
cataloguing task is going to be required to describe the subjectmatter
of each picture: in the case of Plot's work, it happens that there is
such a list in William Upcott's bibliographical account of British
topography of 1818, but in other cases the information may have to be
derived from the book itself. Only thus will it be possible for people
to actually search for images by subject in this context, as in the
context of the loose prints in the British Museum to which the pilot
project is devoted, and the result should be greatly to extend the
accessibility of visual material of this kind.

Then, there is the issue of the quality of the reproductions available.
EEBO books are generally reproduced from microfilms, which often fail to
do justice to the quality of images, particularly engraved ones. Let me
illustrate this by the engraved portrait of Archbishop Whitgift from
Holland's *Heroologia* that I showed you earlier. Here is a scanned
image. Here is the version of it that appears in EEBO. On the other
hand, what EEBO does provide is a record of the printed content of the
book, and hence the print's setting, and it is surely crucial that this
should be a prime consideration in any study of the image in question.
The British Museum collection itself illustrates the results of past
philistinism is removing illustrations from the books to which they
belong -- a number of the slides that I have shown you exemplify this --
and the last thing we would want is to encourage a similar valuation of
the images in isolation from their context in electronic form. Hence,
even if the scanned images are in a separate database from the text with
which they belong, assiduous cross-referencing will be needed to ensure
that people consider them together. So there may be room for cooperation
here with projects like EEBO, and in any case cooperation between a
range of bodies will undoubtedly be required to make possible this vast
potential project, beside which the current work on the British Museum
collection, challenging as it is, seems small by comparison.