Compositor: Recovering the Grammar of Ornament

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.

The images Compositor contains are inherently non-elitist: they were all created and used by working-class craftspeople, and feature scenes from popular culture and daily life, as well as motifs from high art depicted simply and engagingly. By making this enormous bank of images freely discoverable, Compositor can be used to engage hard-to-reach audiences, and create new paths to creative expression and personal development for marginalised communities.

Partnerships with a new educational letterpress and a community charity are central to this project's impact activities. Many universities and other educational institutions already own letterpresses, and they should be at the front line of public engagement and outreach. This project will formulate a strategy for increasing the effectiveness of public-facing activities using letterpress. This will be achieved by employing 3D-printing technology to re-create ornamental blocks from Compositor. The blocks will be used in a hands-on workshop, with an innovative and accessible focus on images. We will work with the charity Stretch to identify vulnerable individuals who stand to gain increased confidence and sense of community through skill development and access to culture. The participants will acquire skills in graphic design and communication by using Compositor to learn from the past about how word and image can be combined effectively, empowering them to experiment with letterpress to express themselves.

The Fellowship will sponsor the creation of a digital toolkit, which will enable the workshop to roll out at educational letterpresses nationwide, making a major intervention in the national public engagement agenda. The workshop will achieve a lasting legacy by providing the inspiration for a series of poems by the acclaimed writer Joanne Clement, a specialist in the poetic interpretation of woodblock ornaments. Her poems will celebrate ornaments as emblems of working-class craft and creativity, and their publication online will showcase the potential of Compositor to connect new audiences to the past, and inspire future creativity. These events and outputs will engage the public with the Fellowship's core research theme of rethinking the relationship between words and images.

Compositor will also have a transformative impact on the antiquarian book trade, where it will set a new professional standard. Compositor will enable antiquarian booksellers to verify bibliographical information, helping them to make reliable valuations, to detect frauds and piracies, and potentially to identify stolen goods. This Fellowship will support widespread and effective uptake of Compositor in the trade, by enabling the production of formal guidelines for booksellers and institutional buyers, formulated in partnership with the Antiquarian Booksellers Association. Practical support will be provided at training events. With the support of the Fellowship, booksellers will gain increased trust from their customers, leading to an increase in revenue. In turn, the wider public will gain confidence in the high-value purchases made by libraries with income from donations, bequests, and tax contributions, leading to an increased sense of investment in national collections. The impact is not limited to the high end of the trade: Compositor represents an opportunity for potential book collectors of any financial means to discover books with previously unnoticed connections, tapping into the appetite for detective work fuelled by successful television programmes like the BBC's 'Britain's Lost Masterpieces' and 'Fake or Fortune'. These programmes have shown us that members of the public can discover things that academics have overlooked. The project will recruit young ambassadors who will inspire the next generation to use Compositor to collect creatively, and contribute to the democratisation of a cultural area which is in danger of being seen as elitist.