Print & Probability is an interdisciplinary, NEH- and NSF-funded project at the intersection of book history, computer vision, and machine learning that seeks to discover letterpress printers whose identities have eluded scholars for several hundred years.
Our team of book historians, statisticians, computer scientists, and librarians tackles bibliographical mysteries by modeling the material conditions of early modern print shops.
Among the aspects we model are fonts and type pieces, paper, inking, and imposition.
Print & Probability is a collaboration among researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, San Diego. The team's led by Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (UCSD Computer Science), Max G'Sell (CMU Statistics and Machine Learning), and Christopher Warren (CMU English and History) and also includes Matthew Lincoln (JSTOR Labs), Kartik Goyal (TTIC), Nikolai Vogler (UCSD CS PhD Student), Sam Lemley (CMU Libraries), Elizaveta Pertseva (UCSD undergrad), Kari Thomas (CMU History PhD Student), D.J. Schuldt (Simmmons MLIS student), Elizabeth Dietrich (CMU English PhD Student), Laura DeLuca (CMU English PhD Student), John Ladd (Washington & Jefferson Computing and Information Studies), and Jonathan Armoza.
Our beta Coloring Book Paper Analysis Tool analyzes remote IIIF images from repositories such as the British Library, Internet Archive, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Users can generate and study LUV or RBG color profiles for each page in a digitized book, thereby permitting fine-grained investigations of changes and continuities in paper-stocks, and sequencing of printing.
The Print & Probability Workbench we use internally is a Django-powered REST API for powering P&P's data transformation and tagging pipeline. To classify characters, we use Ocular, a state-of-the-art historical OCR system developed in part by team co-lead Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick.
Warren, Christopher N, Samuel V Lemley, D J Schuldt, Elizabeth Dieterich, Laura S DeLuca, Max G’Sell, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Kari Thomas, Kartik Goyal, and Nikolai Vogler. “Who Rpinted Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio?” Shakespeare Quarterly 74, no. 2 (June 9, 2023): 139–46. https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad021.
Vogler, Nikolai, Kartik Goyal, Kishore PV Reddy, Elizaveta Pertzeva, Samuel V. Lemley, Christopher N. Warren, Max G’Sell, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. “Contrastive Attention Networks for Attribution of Early Modern Print.” In Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07998
Warren, Christopher, Pierce Williams, Shruti Rijhwani, and Max G’Sell. “Damaged Type and Areopagitica’s Clandestine Printers.” Milton Studies 62, no. 1 (Spring 2020). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/miltonstudies.62.1.0001.
Goyal, Kartik, Chris Dyer, Christopher Warren, Max G’Sell, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. “A Probabilistic Generative Model for Typographical Analysis of Early Modern Printing.” ArXiv:2005.01646 [Cs], May 4, 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01646.
Warren, Christopher N., Avery Wiscomb, Pierce Williams, Samuel V. Lemley, and Max G’Sell. “Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with Computational Bibliography? New Angles on Printing Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Ornaments’ Edition.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54, no. 4 (2021): 827–59. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2021.0094.
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“Whig Data: Milton’s Printers in the Restoration,” International Milton Society (2023)
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“Mincing Words: Computational Bibliography as Cookery,” Renaissance Society of America (2023)
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"The Early Modern Book of Numbers," Shakespeare Association of America (2023)
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"Contrastive Attention Networks for Attribution of Early Modern Print,” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (2023)
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"Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press," The Grolier Club Bibliography Week Lecture (2023)
- "Shakespeare, Print Networks, and the History of Clandestine Printing,” Networks 2021
- “Computational Bibliography: Techniques and Analyses,” Association for Computers and Humanities (2021)
David M. Shribman: The Lessons of Areopagitica
[PODCAST: NLP Highlights] Automated Analysis Of Historical Printed Documents, with Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
CMU Projects Sleuth Secret Printers, Teach Shakespeare in VR
CMU Receives NEH Grant To Develop Bibliographic Tools
RBS’s Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Awards Second Annual Essay Prize (Honorable Mention)
Shruti Rijhwani, Dan Evans, Avery Wiscomb, Pierce Williams, Craig Stamm, Sriram Viswanathan
Print and Probability gratefully acknowledges grants from CMU Mellon Seed Grants, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.