Review: English Broadside Ballad Archive

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

1-1-2003

Publication Title

Reference Reviews

Volume

32

Issue

1

First page number:

25

Last page number:

26

Abstract

Broadside ballads, single-sided printed pages with woodcut illustrations, a poem and the name of the tune that a singer could fit to the lyrics, conveyed the seventeenth-century-equivalent of today’s viral memes. Ballads were written, sung and printed to publish news, to retell historical events and stories, to report crimes, to celebrate courtship and love and to wonder at natural and supernatural phenomena. The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a project to digitize all known seventeenth-century broadside ballads. In progress since 2003, EBBA is an exemplary digital humanities project that models digital sustainability and ambition in recreating and preserving musical knowledge for future generations.

Language

eng

UNLV article access

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