VISUALIZING THE PEPYS BALLADS

Tassie Gniady

Samuel Pepys was best known for his seventeenth-century diary giving first-hand accounts of famous historical incidents like the Great Plague of London and the 1666 fire that destroyed much of the city. He also wrote about his job as a naval administrator and chronicled his day-to-day life with his wife and household. Upon his death, his library was bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The collection known as the Pepys Ballads are a collection of over 1800 broadside ballads—all but one published in the seventeenth century. The earliest part of the collection was part of a set belonging to John Selden, probably purchased from a reseller long after his death. Pepys took Selden’s ballads and his own and pasted them into albums—often trimming the ballads so they would fit in the books. The five volumes are roughly chronological, but the organizing influence that Pepys did exert over the collection may be found in his category distinctions. There are thirteen categories to which Pepys assigned ballads: Devotion and Morality; History—True and Fabulous; Tragedy—vizt. Mrdrs. Executns. Judgmts. of God &c.; State and Times; Love–Pleasant; Love—Unfortunate, Love—Pleasant & Unfortunate; Marriage, Cuckholdry &c.; Sea—Love, Gallantry & Actions; Drinking & Good Fellowship; Humour, Frollicks, &c. mixt; Various Subjects; and A Small Promiscuous Supplement upon most of the ______ Subjects.

One of the professional accomplishments Pepys was known for was bringing order to the recording keeping of the Navy. Accordingly, he made a chart of his own attempts to bring order to an often unruly collection of cheap print. While the English Ballad Archive (EBA) allows scholars unprecedented access to Pepys Ballads, and even allows for searching by Pepys Category, it is not possible to take in the scope of the collection as whole, and, to my knowledge, no one has ever attempted to visualize the content of cheap print. Tessa Watt, in her book, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, does provide a table of printers for cheap print but it is a standard genealogical table with the addition of apprenticeships and business acquistions as relationship characteristics.

My visualization will allow users to comprehend the organizational structure of the entire archive, according to Pepys and would be used by scholars already interested in the Pepys collection who wish to grasp its organizational structure in a new way. To this end, I imported tables with all the pertinent cataloguing and url information from the proprietary SQLServer environment to MySQL with hopes of implementing the following visualization in Processing.

Initially I looked at the genealogical knowledge map constructed by Diderot for its organic structure. I also looked at Wescamp and Albritton's Newsmap for ideas about 2D organization of lots of information. David Aubers Tulip Software is another more organic-looking solution for displaying large data sets. Eventually, when the ballads are all transcribed, a project like Santiago Ortiz's Spherical Surface of Dialogue or Bradford Paley's TextArc could reveal interesting semantic relationships within individual ballads. Mark Daggett's suggestion of using statitically improbably phrases in the ballads is also an interesting project to consider.

For my project, I sifted through the 1800 ballads and chose icons for each of the categories from representative ballads (see below). I did fold two of the similar categories into each other (Various Subjects is aligned with the Promiscuous Supplement and Drinking & Good Fellowship subsumed Humor & Frolics due the similar content and their small relative sizes as categories). Each of these icons will be color-coded to help the viewer gain visual literacy about what s/he is seeing. For example, Marriage will be tinted red and Sea will be tinted blue. By having a consistent icon and color for each category, the 1800 data points should not be as overwhelming. In addition, because categories happen in chunks, the first ballad of a given category will be represented by the complete icon, but subsequent icons will rest behind the first, simply adding to a color trail that will only be broken by a new category.

There will be a clickable title at the top of the page: English Ballad Archive. Underneath the words Pepys Categories will also be clickable, taking the user to the essays on the various categories already mounted on the site. At the right will be a color legend for the various categories. Initially, I had envisioned being able to provide more information about each ballad by clicking on it from this main page and having a thumbnail and title appear at the bottom of the page. However, in consultation with George Legrady, it became clear that I might be trying to do too much on one screen. In accordance with his project An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, 1993, I think it would be better if this overview page led some more discrete views, perhaps by volume, so that there will only be about 400 data points. To that end, the volume designators underneath the x-axis of the main page will lead to a detail page in which just that volume will be presented. Using Processing’s navigation abilities (especially in the OCD library), I will create a separate class for each category that allows individual clickability so that title and a thumbnail will appear at the bottom of the page. The title itself will be clickable and lead back to EBA and a full-size view of the ballad, its transcription, tune, and catalogue information. It might also be necessary to have a more general introductory page to the project, in which the various components are laid out, thereby allowing the user to go to the overview or volume views directly. An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, 1993 uses the metaphor of an art gallery, and I had contemplated using a book to organize this overview, but the spatial demands of the project do not mesh well with the two-page at time view of a book. Instead each volume could be seen as a gallery wing or a section of a  personal library like Pepys’. I had thought about allowing each category to be a section, but the uneven distribution of ballads across categories would necessitate the detail page for Love Pleasant (which contains about 600 ballads) looking very different from the detail page for Sea (which contains about 97 ballads).  Instead, the volume division, which is roughly chronological, would allow for some variation in a page and similar feels for the different detail views, as each volume is about the same length.