Automatic Compositor Attribution in the First Folio of Shakespeare
This addresses a bibliographic task for historians and literary scholars, offering an incremental improvement through automation.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically attributing pages in Shakespeare's First Folio to individual compositors by analyzing textual and visual features, achieving 87% accuracy in agreement with manual bibliographic judgments.
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.