Singing the praises of digitized ballads.

Previous stories on this blog have considered a number of digitization projects. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California-Santa Barbara has to rate amongst the very best which I have seen. The most innovative feature is the 'Facsimile Transcriptions' option, whereby transcribed roman text is superimposed over the original black letter, rendering the whole thing highly readable, but preserving the original layout and contextual illustrations. No wonder it won the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Digital Eighteenth Century Prize for 2009. Whilst it may be a bit of a mouthful, it is certainly earned. Do visit it, so you can see the most famous diarist's ballad collection.