Early Print Research Articles

Fragments of the Ukrainian Book Collections in the Ossolineum’s Holdings of Early Printed Books in Wrocław

The article describes fragments of book collections from five Ukrainian institutions – the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the “Studion” in Lviv, “Ridna Shkola” Ukrainian Pedagogical Society, the National Museum in Lviv, and the Greek Catholic Chapter in Przemyśl – which are currently housed in the Early Printed Books Department at the Ossolineum in Wrocław. In addition to the list of books from these collections, the publication provides a brief overview of their history and fortunes after World War II and the circumstances under which these books found their way to the collection of the Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław.

The longitudinal impact of pre- and postnatal maternal depression and anxiety on children's cognitive and language development.

We investigated the longitudinal associations among maternal pre- and postnatal depression, maternal anxiety, and children's language and cognitive development followed from 15 to 61 months. Furthermore, we assessed the protective role of children's early print experiences with books against the adverse effect of maternal depression on language development. Data for mothers and children (51.7% boys, 95% White, N = 11,662) were from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Prenatal maternal depression held an adverse association with child language (β = -.16, p = .002). Moreover, the risk was greater for girls than boys (β = .19, p = .02). In addition, prenatal depression was significantly and negatively associated with child verbal intelligence quotient (β = -.11, p = .02) and performance intelligence quotient (β = -.12, p = .01). In contrast, postnatal depression or anxiety were not unique predictors of child outcomes. Importantly, children's early experiences with books, as measured by the reported frequency of parent-child shared reading, moderated the negative association between maternal depression and child language development (β = .30, p < .001). Although modest in size, these findings inform models of child risk and resilience related to maternal psychopathology. The results also have implications for clinical programs as well as for prevention and intervention studies focusing on at-home early literacy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A novel layer-based optimization method for stabilizing the early printing stage of LPBF process

ABSTRACT The laser power bed fusion (LPBF) forming process introduces heat accumulation and variations in powder layer thickness, which can destabilize the melt track and reduce surface quality. This phenomenon is especially more serious in the early printing stage. To tackle this stability problem, we proposed a novel approach optimizing process parameters on a layer-specific basis. At first, a numerical database was constructed through a set of numerical simulations. Then, a neural network prediction model was trained based on the database. Finally, this prediction model was embedded into a genetic algorithm for layer-based prediction. To verify the prediction results on processing parameters and calibrate the prediction model, physical experiments were prepared. The developed model consistently exhibited relative errors mostly within 6%. It is noteworthy that the relative errors between the numerical simulation results and the expected values were only 0.77% in width and 1.11% in depth. Printing optimization test was applied for an LPBF machine with a Invar alloy powder. The proposed method yielded positive results in both numerical simulations and the printing test. It can be further adopted for new material printing parameter optimization due to an efficient printing stability in the early-stage for LPBF process.

Johann Ulrich Surgantʼs Manuale curatorum predicandi as a product of medieval intellectual heritage in Basel libraries

Manuale curatorum predicandi – the treatise on the art of preaching written by Basel scholar Johann Ulrich Surgant in 1502 – is usually classified as a humanist and nearly proto-reformation work. The paper disputes this classification; it provides several analytical textual probes to show the deep dependence of the Manuale curatorum on the older scholastic tradition. Following on from former research, a few relatively well-known high and late medieval artes praedicandi are identified as the main sources of Surgantʼs writing. Moreover, the study aims to trace specific manuscripts or early prints in Basel libraries, which could have been directly used by the author-compiler.

Digitisation of Middle Low German Incunabula and Early Prints

Digitisation of Middle Low German Incunabula and Early Prints

Index of Shelfmarks

An index of all shelfmarks and accession numbers cited in reference to manuscript or early print material in Fragmentology 6 (2023).

Effect of laser power on microstructure and mechanical properties of pure Zn fabricated via laser powder bed fusion

The preparation of biodegradable pure Zn porous scaffolds using additive manufacturing technology has great potential for application. However, the mechanical properties of pure Zn are not sufficient for the clinical application of stents. An object of this paper was to investigate the effect of laser power on microstructural evolution and tensile properties of pure Zn fabricated via laser powder bed fusion (LPBF). The results demonstrated that the temperature gradient and heat storage were the main factors determining the microstructure. The formation of columnar grains was due to the high temperature gradient in the early printing stage, and the equiaxed grains in the middle and top region were attributed to the heat storage induced recrystallization and columnar-to-equiaxed transition (CET), respectively. In addition, as the laser power increased from 40 W to 60 W, the recrystallization degree increased, and the Kernel average misorientation value and Taylor factor decreased gradually, resulting in a significant increase in the ductility. The mechanical properties were maximized at the laser power of 60 W and the scanning rate of 150 mm/s (yield strength, tensile strength and elongation of samples can reach 82.02 MPa, 116.20 MPa and 37.16 %, respectively). This work provides theoretical support for optimizing the mechanical properties of LPBF Zn-based materials by microstructural regulation.

За кирилицата като шрифт на Балканите през XV–XVI век

The author explores the following issues: the differing graphical systems of the early print Cyrillic fonts and their role in establishing common identity through achieving cultural unity in graphical diversity. The paper provides conclusions about the types of orthographic systems (the Tarnovo two-nasal system and the Raška and Resava systems); the graphical inventory of individual editions according to selected differential features; the areal and cultural specifics of the studied editions. The author argues that the early print Cyrillic fonts functioned as a sign and information system and a cultural phenomenon that upheld tradition and rein-forced its literary prestige.

ՀՀ ԳԱԱ Հիմնարար գիտական գրադարանի «էդգարյան» հավաքածուն

The "Edgaryan" collection of the Fundamental Scientific Library of NAS RA needs to be valued first of all from the point of view of the history of printing. Includes old printed books, early prints and the printed materials until 1920 that form the basis of this collection. Many of the existing printed books (we will examine the periodicals, handwritten notes and seals in the future publications) are considered unique prints, because they are either missing in other Armenian libraries, or damaged copies have been preserved. The study of the collection made it possible to complete the bibliographic data of a number of books, to find such editions that were described with asterisks in the union bibliographic lists of Armenian books.

The Binding Fragments of Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Abstract: This article provides an overview of the medieval manuscript items found in University Archives and Special Collections at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. After describing the history of the Xavier University collection, it offers descriptions of nineteen binding fragments recently found within twelve early print volumes and includes provenance information for those volumes when possible. The article ends by reflecting on the benefits of participation in the Peripheral Manuscripts Project and sharing how project outcomes are influencing Special Collections work at Xavier.

Exhausting but Not Boring—and Rather Exciting: The Process and Politics of a Documentation and Digitization Project in Jerba, Tunisia

Abstract: The Jerba Libraries Project (JLP) was an initiative carried out between 2019 and 2021 to document and digitize private and public collections of Arabic manuscript and early print collections on the island of Jerba, Tunisia. In this article, we present the project's aims, its achievements, and the obstacles it faced for those considering embarking on similar projects. We also use the example of this project to argue that manuscript documentation and digitization projects like it must speak to local actors, both engaging and benefitting them. We begin by explaining the origins of the project's pilot in 2017. In addition to generating a methodology for documenting and digitizing textual materials, the pilot allowed the project team to establish connections and build a reputation on the island that was important for acquiring local supporters and participants. We describe the methodology itself as followed in JLP, including some of the challenges faced by the team. To make the results of the project more concrete, we offer some quantitative data on its outcomes and a short qualitative example. We close with the perspectives of different team members on the impact and politics of projects like the JLP: public engagement, the labor behind the production of the images, the users of the images, and the knowledge produced from them.

The Cavaliero Pasquil: An Anti-Marprelate Persona

Abstract: Broadly considered, the popular pamphlets written against Martin Marprelate in the months encompassing 1589–1591 are treated as pale imitations of their adversary, whose rhetorical and argumentative virtuosity earned him great notoriety. Considered as strenuous attempts to both counter Martinist aggression and also solve the rhetorical problems he presented, the aggressive Pasquil tracts (1589–1590) reveal how the adoption of an established satirical persona and mode allows a writer defending the Elizabethan bishops to both adopt and condemn the dangerous speech marking the Marprelate program. The tracts thus exhibit the self-generative and popular appeal characteristic of early print and pamphlet culture.

隋나라 寶貴 등 合譯 『合部金光明經』의 호법성과 호국성-元曉 『金光明經疏』와 청주 고인쇄박물관 소장 『합부금광명경』 권3과 관련하여-

隋나라 寶貴 등 合譯 『合部金光明經』의 호법성과 호국성-元曉 『金光明經疏』와 청주 고인쇄박물관 소장 『합부금광명경』 권3과 관련하여-

Macarius: A HTR Model for Romanian Slavonic Early Printed Books

The paper describes the process of creating and evaluating the HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) model for Romanian Slavonic early printed books (first half of the 16th century, Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, Cyrillic Script) using the Transkribus software platform, based on the principles of artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced neural networks. The HTR model was created on the material of Romanian Slavonic early printed books from Târgovişte printing house: the Liturgikon from 1508 and the Teatraevangelion from 1512 from the oldest printing house managed by hieromonk Macarius, as well as the Apostle from 1547 from the printing house managed by Dimitrije Ljubavić. The most important result of the paper is the creation of the first version of the generic HTR model Macarius (named in honour of hieromonk Makarije, the first South Slavonic and Romanian printer) with exceptional performance – the percentage of incorrectly recognized characters (including accent marks) is only 2.7%. Research has shown that this HTR model can also be used for the automatic recognition of Romanian Slavonic early printed books published in the second half of the 16th century. HTR model Macarius together with Ground Truth data is available to all users of the Transkribus platform, which ensures its wider use, as well as the possibility for further improvement of its performance.

The Children's Picture Books Lexicon (CPB-LEX): A large-scale lexical database from children's picture books.

This article presents CPB-LEX, a large-scale database of lexical statistics derived from children's picture books (age range 0-8 years). Such a database is essential for research in psychology, education and computational modelling, where rich details on the vocabulary of early print exposure are required. CPB-LEX was built through an innovative method of computationally extracting lexical information from automatic speech-to-text captions and subtitle tracks generated from social media channels dedicated to reading picture books aloud. It consists of approximately 25,585 types (wordforms) and their frequency norms (raw and Zipf-transformed), a lexicon of bigrams (two-word sequences and their transitional probabilities) and a document-term matrix (which shows the importance of each word in the corpus in each book). Several immediate contributions of CPB-LEX to behavioural science research are reported, including that the new CPB-LEX frequency norms strongly predict age of acquisition and outperform comparable child-input lexical databases. The database allows researchers and practitioners to extract lexical statistics for high-frequency words which can be used to develop word lists. The paper concludes with an investigation of how CPB-LEX can be used to extend recent modelling research on the lexical diversity children receive from picture books in addition to child-directed speech. Our model shows that the vocabulary input from a relatively small number of picture books can dramatically enrich vocabulary exposure from child-directed speech and potentially assist children with vocabulary input deficits. The database is freely available from the Open Science Framework repository: https://tinyurl.com/4este73c .

Contrastive Attention Networks for Attribution of Early Modern Print

In this paper, we develop machine learning techniques to identify unknown printers in early modern (c.~1500--1800) English printed books. Specifically, we focus on matching uniquely damaged character type-imprints in anonymously printed books to works with known printers in order to provide evidence of their origins. Until now, this work has been limited to manual investigations by analytical bibliographers. We present a Contrastive Attention-based Metric Learning approach to identify similar damage across character image pairs, which is sensitive to very subtle differences in glyph shapes, yet robust to various confounding sources of noise associated with digitized historical books. To overcome the scarce amount of supervised data, we design a random data synthesis procedure that aims to simulate bends, fractures, and inking variations induced by the early printing process. Our method successfully improves downstream damaged type-imprint matching among printed works from this period, as validated by in-domain human experts. The results of our approach on two important philosophical works from the Early Modern period demonstrate potential to extend the extant historical research about the origins and content of these books.

An Early Printing of an Anonymous Tract by Francis Bacon

An Early Printing of an Anonymous Tract by Francis Bacon

The Dialectical Questions: Erotemata dialectices, by Philip Melanchthon, trans. and with an introduction by Jeanne Fahnestock

The Dialectical Questions: Erotemata dialectices, by Philip Melanchthon, trans. and with an introduction by Jeanne Fahnestock

Line-Level Layout Recognition of Historical Documents with Background Knowledge

Digitization and transcription of historic documents offer new research opportunities for humanists and are the topics of many edition projects. However, manual work is still required for the main phases of layout recognition and the subsequent optical character recognition (OCR) of early printed documents. This paper describes and evaluates how deep learning approaches recognize text lines and can be extended to layout recognition using background knowledge. The evaluation was performed on five corpora of early prints from the 15th and 16th Centuries, representing a variety of layout features. While the main text with standard layouts could be recognized in the correct reading order with a precision and recall of up to 99.9%, also complex layouts were recognized at a rate as high as 90% by using background knowledge, the full potential of which was revealed if many pages of the same source were transcribed.

Minority press and control in the Ottoman State and the Republic of Turkey: the example of the Armenian press

In line with the stages that humanity has gone through, the technique of putting information on paper with symbols has evolved gradually. Modern printing techniques evolved from early printing techniques and materials. Subjects of the Ottoman Empire closely followed advances in Europe, and the printing press was introduced there. Armenians significantly advanced printing and publishing in the Ottoman and Turkish Republic eras. They established printing facilities and published books, periodicals, newspapers, and other things. While carrying out these activities, they sometimes received awards, but they had problems in some periods. Due to some of the contents in the materials they published, they were punished such as closing the newspapers and magazines, having the books confiscated, or not being brought into the country. The Turkish government has also closely followed materials published abroad. While examining the minority press in the Ottoman and Turkish Republics, this article focuses on the Armenian press.