ABSTRACT
The early modern center's (EMC's) english broadside ballad archive (EBBA), for instance, is dedicated to digitizing all surviving ballads printed in English, with priority given to black-letter broadsides printed in the broadside-ballad heyday of the seventeenth century. The digital archiving that is proceeding apace on a global basis expresses an age-old "human obsession," as Kevin Curran observes. Recognition of the dismembering practices of contemporary printing and reception of broadside ballads puts in context as more "normal" or "representative" some of the apparent oddities practiced by the most prominent collector of English seventeenth-century ballads and popular print, Samuel Pepys. Nearly as important because they offer free access, are the online projects inspired by such databases, such as the EMC's EBBA at university of california, santa barbara and its first phase of development, the Pepys Ballad Archive. Pepys was also determined to bring them into a single "whole" aesthetic vision but once again through a constant process of reshuffling.
