Printers and Printer's Marks

Printer's Marks have much allure. The combination of Renaissance engraving artistry with classical symbolism, and the quirky choices of self representation of the early printers: those sometimes humorous, sometimes cutthroat capitalists who were also impressive scholars and artists, who tended to come from and generate dynasties of their profession, frequently making corporations with other printers, intermarrying, striking it rich, going bankrupt, litigating, specializing in different types of literature…

The history of printing is a huge subject far beyond the scope of today's discussion, or any site I could build alone. To introduce the topic very briefly, though printing's roots go back as early as the 2nd century BCE in China, the first European movable type printing press was probably invented by Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany in 1453. Very soon, printing had spread from Germany to its Scandinavian neighbors, then to France and Italy, England, Spain, the Americas, entering into the major seats of commerce.

In the 16 ^th  century, printing developed to new heights of skill and artistry, and established systems of self-governance. Cities like Venice in Italy reigned supreme, or Lyons in France. Having achieved the apparatus and skills, many members of printing dynasties departed to different cities in different nations, often altering their names to fit in better with their new language, thus the ancestor of the famous Sebastian Gryphius of Lyons was Michael Greyff of Reutlingen, Germany.

The marks of the printers that I saw in those books of the Treasure Room weren’t just visual icons to identify their business. They were complex self-definitions, sometimes of individual printers, sometimes of fraternities, stating in clusters of symbolism what values they held preeminent. Marks do not exist in isolation, either, but in the frame of the front or back pages. These frames are often ornate fantasies elaborating on the art and architecture of the times, as well as nature and religion. The printers mark is thoroughly integrated into the context of the book, so that to extract it and look at it in isolation seems like taking an artifact from an archeological dig without noting the surrounding layer.

After my internship was completed, I focused my library studies on database programming. It was in a course of Drupal development that I had the idea to create a database of the Diamond Printers’ Marks that would act as a viewing gallery for the images, contextualized in their books, combined with as much information as I could gather on the printers who made them and the traditional meanings of the symbols in their marks. 

With my class partners I developed a site designed to submit several different “content types” into Drupal: Printer, Symbol, Source, and Mark, all linked to one another.  There was a gallery with dynamic display for images. After I input all the data, the site was open for tagging and comments. We designed usability studies, and even created forms for the public to submit their own marks.

Diamond Printer's Marks was a beautiful, but a short-lived project. After a migration the site became vulnerable to hacking and had to be taken offline. As I did not continue working steadily with Drupal, I had no real opportunity to work on upgrading or rebuilding the site. The version of Drupal I created the site with, 6.20, does not now function properly when installed on a host.

I did manage to import a semi-functional version of the original DPM onto a version of Drupal 8.6, that contains the data but won't show the images in context. You can view an example of this  here .

In the meantime, in the course of my position as an Open Educational Resources librarian at Brooklyn College, I have worked in the last few years on developing sites on cost-free web presentation platforms.  I had the thought that in order to free myself from the previous way of imagining the site, I should switch my vessel for presenting it, and try rebuilding Diamond Printer's Marks as an "OER," using something other than Drupal-preferably, something that had dedicated technical support of the back end, so that I would not be responsible for upgrades and security.

Of the cost-free, media-rich archival platforms that I knew, Omeka.net was the one that had the best item-specific metadata and the largest file size upload limit: 128 MB is the limit for individual files; the site storage limit is 500 MB.  However, it is not the platform with which the most dynamic presentations can be made; in fact, the free version is very limited, though robust. I have been working a lot with  StoryMaps , and other tools of  ArcGIS , the online mapping interface owned by Esri Corporation. It seemed to me that the story of the early printers, as well as the story of this project, could benefit from a geographic perspective, in other words, a map.

Another reason I was interested in these two applications in combination, is that they share a technical feature: both ArcGIS and and Omeka support CSV file import and export.

Would it be possible to use my old Drupal tables to create an Omeka archive of my Diamond Law Library photographs, together with as much description and information as I could put together, then export it as a CSV file? And would I then, be able to import that into an ArcGIS map?

I began by reassembling my code files, papers, and images. I was able to convert my SQL database tables to CSV files.  The difficulty was in identifying the tables that actually contained readable data, but they eventually emerged. The next step was deleting all of the irrelevant fields, columns and rows.

Then, using my “free option” to create one archive on  Omeka.net , I selected from their very minimal and un-editable theme and appearance options and constructed "Item Types" that matched those I had used before.

Next I began the work of importing the data. Significant editing of tables was necessary to make this work. Field mapping to the existing DublinCore set elements is the tricky aspect of Omeka import. The best feature of the import engine is ability to designate a field a "Tag" field. Then all of the entries in that field become tags. Shared tags are the only significant way to make different items link automatically. Of course, there is no limit to the time-consuming manual linking that can be performed.

CSV import only provided a base set of records for the Omeka database. File import failed completely, though I tried several different ways. Ultimately it was necessary to re-upload all the image files of the site one by one.

Though each record was created in Omeka, there was alot of necessary editing of characters that did not come over properly, or items that seemed to be in the wrong place. Automatic import created an imperfect product, although it was a place to begin.

The very limited options for layout and theme created a frustrating problem as well. There is no CSS editing in the "free" Omeka.net. Aesthetically, all the themes are very clunky and strange, though there are some nice looking "exhibit" features. To entice you into paying a subscription, Omeka dangles more functional and attractive options in the interface, just out of reach.

Finally, the biggest problem is that beyond its tagging capabilities, Omeka.net is not a relational database-in other words, I could not link the Printers marks to the Printers, Symbols, or Sources through queries. This is the feature I miss the most in Drupal. It makes it necessary to go into each item and create links one by one. This is not a big problem with such a small archival sample, but it would be if it were much larger.

I have given the new Omeka Archive a new name to differentiate it from the old Diamond Printers Marks site. It is worth taking a few minutes to  examine its features for yourself .

I now was ready to move on to the mapping step of the project. In order to achieve a rendering of the Omeka data in an ArcGIS map, I needed to find two things: a "Geolocation" field to create my map, and a way to export the "free" Omeka database, (which did not supply an automated option) to a CSV file. Fortunately I was able to achieve the second object easily with a combination of a Python script and turning on the Omeka API. Unfortunately, the CSV file was a huge, cryptic mess. It took quite a bit of transformation and re-formatting before I had a suitable file for even attempting import into ArcGIS.

When I finally was ready to test the import of the "Printers" table, I had a setback. My geolocation field was "City and Country." I found that this method would not create an effective visualization when a city had more than one printer, as all the pins went directly on top of one another. At first, I "solved" this problem by cheating, as I saw it-I just assigned each Printer an arbitrary address within that city. This made each pin visible on its own, but it made a very misleading map. Would it be possible to find out where the printers' workshops and homes had really been?

Thus I embarked on the most interesting and difficult part of this project-an attempt to find the real location of as many of the printers' workshops or homes as I could. This task involved extensive research in primary and secondary sources, and in the process of doing it, I discovered that there was much more information on the printers than I had thought, most of it in different languages. My best sources were "CERL" (Consortium of European Libraries-mostly French, Italian, Polish, and German), and the site "Marques d'impressors" (of the Universitat de Barcelona). The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani provided more comprehensive information on printers' lives. For mapping, one stunning antique source is Georg Braun's Civitates orbis terrarum, published at Antwerp in 1575, which provides detailed engravings of major cities of the author's day, with numbered legends of important sites.

Besides the above mentioned sources, I found a wealth of books, articles, exhibits, wikis, sites, archives, and blogs. I have included translations and quotations of excerpts of these on the  Omeka site .

In the end, I found evidence for most of the workshop locations, along with strange and sometimes moving stories of the printers' work and lives. I was able to make the map I wanted, and in doing so, I enriched the information in the archive.

Click on the pins and zoom in for more information. Though the view of this map is set to Venice, you can pull out to see printer pins in other parts of Europe.

I also wanted data for more simple maps on the "Growth and Spread of Printing"-this data was relatively easy to find, and without too much re-formatting, I was able to make CSV files that pulled into an ArcGIS map to show spread of printing presses through cities.

The last step in this process has been to create this StoryMap to tell my tale, and to present the ArcGIS maps, Diamond Law Library images, and other media.  ArcGIS Esri,  which owns  StoryMaps , has many powerful cost free web development tools, and though the sheer number of its features can be confusing, it rewards the effort of learning where they are and how to use them.

Although using two separate vehicles for this project is not a unified approach, it is interesting to see how Omeka and ArcGIS complement one another's strong points and deficiencies. I would recommend the free version of each of these platforms, in tandem or alone, for faculty, students, web developers, librarians and archivists, or whoever wishes to present:

Small digital archives and exhibits

Data driven, digital maps

Dynamic presentations that include: interactive mapping as well as images, videos, visual effects.

Diamond Law Library Printer's Marks is by no means a perfected or completed archive. It has many shortcomings and there is much work still to be done. The same can be said of the ArcGIS maps that accompany the archive. Both are works in progress and could benefit from usability studies, redesign of certain elements, and much more editing and research. I believe, however, that I have achieved at least my initial goal of "rebooting" my original site as an open educational resource and presenting the best of my DLL photographs in an environment which enhances their beauty and meaning.

I welcome you to examine the archive, exhibits, and maps for yourselves and to give me your feedback. To facilitate your comments in the most contextualized way, I have created a "Hypothes.is" group for this project, which you can join by  following this link  and  registering with Hypothes.is . Please feel free to contact me at emily.fairey86@brooklyn.cuny.edu with any questions about this, or other aspects of the site.

Click on the "More Information" button on each slide to navigate to its page on the Omeka archive.