In this section I’m referring to individual characters in printed type, not correspondence! But there’s lots of great computational work on early modern correspondence that I may add at a later time.
4.1 Sample Research Questions
Can we discover who printed a text based on damaged pieces of type?
Does Spenser’s spelling indicate a distinct use of archaism?
Can different letterforms and damages be detected algorithimically?
Basu, Anupam, and Joseph Loewenstein. 2019. “Spenser’s Spell: Archaism and HistoricalStylometrics.”Spenser Studies 33 (January): 63–102. https://doi.org/10.1086/700300.
Goyal, Kartik, Chris Dyer, Christopher Warren, Max G’Sell, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. 2020. “A ProbabilisticGenerativeModel for TypographicalAnalysis of EarlyModernPrinting.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.01646.
Vogler, Nikolai, Kartik Goyal, Samuel V. Lemley, D. J. Schuldt, Christopher N. Warren, Max G’Sell, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. 2024. “Clustering RunningTitles to Understand the Printing of EarlyModernBooks.” In Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2024, edited by Elisa H. Barney Smith, Marcus Liwicki, and Liangrui Peng, 374–90. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70543-4_22.
Warren, Christopher N, Samuel V Lemley, D J Schuldt, Elizabeth Dieterich, Laura S DeLuca, Max G’Sell, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Kari Thomas, Kartik Goyal, and Nikolai Vogler. 2023. “Who RpintedShakespeare’s FourthFolio?”Shakespeare Quarterly 74 (2): 139–46. https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad021.
Warren, Christopher N., Pierce Wiliams, Shruti Rijhwani, and Max G’Sell. 2020. “Damaged Type and Areopagitica’s ClandestinePrinters.”Milton Studies 62 (1): 1–47. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/748968.