Automatic Compositor Attribution in the First Folio of Shakespeare

Maria Ryskina, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Dan Garrette, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick


Abstract
Compositor attribution, the clustering of pages in a historical printed document by the individual who set the type, is a bibliographic task that relies on analysis of orthographic variation and inspection of visual details of the printed page. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised model that jointly describes the textual and visual features needed to distinguish compositors. Applied to images of Shakespeare’s First Folio, our model predicts attributions that agree with the manual judgements of bibliographers with an accuracy of 87%, even on text that is the output of OCR.
Anthology ID:
P17-2065
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
411–416
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2065
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-2065
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maria Ryskina, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Dan Garrette, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. 2017. Automatic Compositor Attribution in the First Folio of Shakespeare. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 411–416, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Compositor Attribution in the First Folio of Shakespeare (Ryskina et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2065.pdf
Poster:
 P17-2065.Poster.pdf