Compositor: Recovering the Grammar of Ornament

装饰物是印刷书籍中出现的装饰性图像，用于修饰标题页、标题、章节结尾和任何其他空白处。它们在整个手工印刷时期（约1470 -1830年）都很常见，当时它们是从切割成木头或金属块的设计中印刷出来的，或者是用铅字金属铸造的。装饰品可以描绘任何东西，从几何形状到精致的场景。常见的主题是自然形式（花卉，动物），宗教和古典意象，人和日常物品（从书籍到科学仪器）。Orbit就像书目指纹：它们的独特功能可以让我们识别出一本书的印刷商，即使印刷商没有签名，或者使用了假名。确定一本书的印刷商可以帮助我们确定印刷材料的日期，更好地了解图书贸易的运作方式，以及文本和思想的流通。在文学研究中，印刷工的装饰有助于我们探究一本书的原始生产环境，通过增加我们对作者与赋予其文本物质形式的工匠之间关系的理解，指导学术编辑的决策。Compositor是一个包含100多万件18世纪印刷品的数据库。它是第一个汇集了大量英国装饰品的数据库，这些装饰品完全可以通过图像搜索，使用计算机视觉和机器学习的最新技术。合成器允许用户轻松地找到与特定作者，打印机，出版商或地点相关的装饰品。找到一个装饰品后，我们可以进行视觉搜索，查看数据库中所有匹配或相似的图像。Compositor还允许我们搜索特定的主题（如“花”，“小天使”）。视觉搜索使我们能够回答长期存在的研究问题，并提出新的问题。在多本书中找到同一个装饰品的能力，将使研究那些几乎没有其他文件证据的印刷商的产出成为可能：这对于印刷业的女性、激进或煽动性作品的印刷商以及通过盗版材料破坏伦敦印刷垄断的地区印刷商来说尤其如此。执行视觉搜索的能力也使Compositor成为艺术和设计历史学家的主要新资源。对宗教图像感兴趣的研究人员可以使用新的搜索功能找到大量未被纳入传统视觉文化历史的图像，也可以提出熟悉主题的新问题。该奖学金将支持两个具体的查询，这将导致使用合成器的研究方式。第一部分的奖学金集中在旁观者（1711-12），现代新闻和文学批评的起源。《旁观者》是18世纪最具影响力的文化产品之一，但此前没有研究探讨过该期刊是如何取得如此空前的影响力的。使用Compositor，将有可能发现谁印刷了数百个版本的《旁观者》，以及它的许多衍生作品和改编作品。印刷商的决定塑造了格鲁吉亚英国的市场，并最终塑造了文学品味。团契的第二部分聚焦于世纪最著名的诗人亚历山大蒲柏。蒲柏对他的诗歌在页面上的外观有着浓厚的兴趣，他的书中包含了数百个印刷商的装饰品。在波普之前，他们还出现在其他什么书中？它们对他有什么特殊的文学或社会意义？这些内涵会如何影响我们对诗歌的阅读？有了Compositor，就有可能追溯装饰品的社会生活，从而第一次提出这样的问题。这种方法将被用于教皇的一个重要的新版本，导致我们如何编辑文学文本的更广泛的变化，并推动我们对文字和图像之间的关系的新的理解。

Printers' ornaments are the decorative images that appear in printed books to embellish title pages, headings, chapter endings, and any otherwise blank spaces. They were common throughout the hand press period (c.1470-1830), when they were printed from designs cut into wood or metal blocks, or cast in type-metal. Printers' ornaments can depict anything from geometric shapes to elaborate scenes. Common subjects are natural forms (flowers, animals), religious and classical imagery, people, and everyday objects (from books to scientific instruments). Ornaments are like bibliographical fingerprints: their unique features can allow us to identify the printer of a book, even if the printer did not sign their name, or used a pseudonym. Identifying a book's printer can help us to date printed material, and better understand the workings of the book trade, and the circulation of texts and ideas. In literary studies, printers' ornaments assist in our enquiries into the original circumstances of a book's production, guiding the decisions of scholarly editors by increasing our understanding of the relationships between authors and the craftspeople who gave their texts material form. Compositor is a database of over 1 million eighteenth-century printers' ornaments. It is the first database to bring together a critical mass of British ornaments that is fully image searchable, using the latest technologies in computer vision and machine learning. Compositor allows users to easily locate ornaments associated with a particular author, printer, publisher, or place. Having located an ornament, we can perform a visual search to see all matching or similar images in the database. Compositor also lets us perform searches for specific subjects (like 'flowers', 'cherubs'). Visual searches allow us to answer longstanding research questions, and to formulate new ones. The ability to locate the same ornament in multiple books will make it possible to study the output of individual printers about whom there is little other documentary evidence: this is particularly true of women in printing, printers of radical or seditious works, and regional printers who undermined London's monopoly on printing by pirating material. The ability to perform visual searches also makes Compositor a major new resource for historians of art and design. A researcher interested in (for example) religious imagery, can use the new search functions to find a wealth of images that have not been included in traditional histories of visual culture.It will also be possible to ask new questions of familiar subjects. This Fellowship will support two specific enquiries which will lead the way in research using Compositor. Part 1 of the Fellowship focusses on the Spectator (1711-12), the origin of modern journalism and literary criticism. The Spectator was one of the most influential cultural products of the eighteenth century, but no previous study has asked how the periodical achieved such unprecedented influence. Using Compositor, it will be possible to discover who printed hundreds of editions of the Spectator, and its many spinoffs and adaptations. The decisions of its printers shaped the market, and ultimately literary taste, in Georgian Britain. Part 2 of the Fellowship focusses on Alexander Pope, the eighteenth century's most famous poet. Pope took a keen interest in the appearance of his poems on the page, and his books contain hundreds of printers' ornaments. What other books had they appeared in before Pope's? What special literary or social connotations did they have for him? And how might these connotations affect our reading of the poems? With Compositor it will be possible to trace a social life of ornaments to pose such questions for the first time. This methodology will be used in a major new edition of Pope, leading to a wider change in how we edit literary texts, and driving us towards a new understanding of the relationship between word and image.