Visual Analysis of Chapbooks Printed in Scotland

Abstract

Chapbooks were short, cheap printed booklets produced in large quantities in Scotland, England, Ireland, North America and much of Europe between roughly the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. A form of popular literature containing songs, stories, poems, games, riddles, religious writings and other content designed to appeal to a wide readership, they were frequently illustrated, particularly on their title-pages. This paper describes the visual analysis of such chapbook illustrations. We automatically extract all the illustrations contained in the National Library of Scotland Chapbooks Printed in Scotland dataset, and create a visual search engine to search this dataset using full or part-illustrations as queries. We also cluster these illustrations based on their visual content, and provide keyword-based search of the metadata associated with each publication. The visual search; clustering of illustrations based on visual content; and metadata search features enable researchers to forensically analyse the chapbooks dataset and to discover unnoticed relationships between its elements. We release all annotations and software tools described in this paper to enable reproduction of the results presented and to allow extension of the methodology described to datasets of a similar nature.