{"id":13,"date":"2016-10-25T00:08:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T23:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fleuronweb.wordpress.com\/?p=36"},"modified":"2023-08-01T14:27:53","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T13:27:53","slug":"introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/2016\/10\/25\/introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"An Introduction to Compositor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>What does Compositor contain?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Compositor is a database of eighteenth-century printers\u2019 ornaments, broadly defined as the decorative features of the pages of printed books. It also contains some illustrations: the boundaries between the categories of \u2018ornament\u2019 and \u2018illustration\u2019 are somewhat blurred.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Printers\u2019 ornaments\u2019 is an umbrella term for the devices, flourishes, and images that decorate printed books. The term usually refers to the designs cut by hand in blocks of wood or metal, and also\u00a0\u00a0cast blocks. Printers\u2019 ornaments come in the form of headpieces, tailpieces, initial letters, factotums, and dividers. The database also includes printers\u2019 flowers, or fleurons, which are two terms for ornamental cast type. Fleurons could be assembled into designs consisting of many pieces, or used individually and in pairs for smaller flourishes.<\/p>\n<p>Compositor was created using an image detection program, designed to recognise and extract printers\u2019 ornaments. Because they look similar to printers\u2019 ornaments, the program also extracted smaller illustrations (both woodcuts and engravings), and diagrams and other scientific illustrations. These will remain in the database. Larger illustrations were not captured by the program. The program incorrectly classified some items as ornaments: for example, library stamps, handwritten notes, and blurred or overexposed areas of text. Many of these have already been eliminated, but the process of cleaning up the database is ongoing.<\/p>\n<p>The database currently contains around 1.5 million entries. This will reduce slightly as more\u00a0 incorrectly identified items are gradually removed. Future phases of the project may see the addition of new data to Compositor as well.<\/p>\n<p>You can read about the creation of Compositor in <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly <\/em>here: http:\/\/digitalhumanities.org\/dhq\/vol\/15\/1\/000537\/000537.html#<\/p>\n<p>[This page was edited to amend &#8216;<em>Fleuron<\/em>&#8216; to &#8216;<em>Compositor<\/em>&#8216; after the original site changed its name]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What does Compositor contain? Compositor is a database of eighteenth-century printers\u2019 ornaments, broadly defined as the decorative features of the pages of printed books. It also contains some illustrations: the boundaries between the categories of \u2018ornament\u2019 and \u2018illustration\u2019 are somewhat blurred. \u2018Printers\u2019 ornaments\u2019 is an umbrella term for the devices, flourishes, and images that decorate &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/2016\/10\/25\/introduction\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;An Introduction to Compositor&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":206,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/compositor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}