Back in February I was privileged to go to the University of California, Santa Barbara for the English Broadside Ballad Archive 25th Anniversary Conference, so here is my third post about my first ever trip to the States, of which I have some very fond memories!

In the play written about him, La Monja Alférez, the main role is played by a woman – this was normal in Spain and they could write and direct too. Female leads often got paid more than their male counterparts, and a lot of plays contained manly women, either the cross dressing woman or a woman with masculine qualities. The Erauso character frequently declares that they are not a woman and never conforms to their female gender role. The character has been read as a lesbian, a transgressive woman, a masculine woman and a trans man.

The zarzuela (opera) has a very different take on the story- much less tolerant. In the zarzuela, Erauso eventually admits that they are a woman. It has many more imperial overtones too. At the time it was written hope of Basque home rule was gone and they became enemies of the Spanish in Madrid. The zarzuela contains a basque ballad which demonstrates basque resistance to Spain.

Simone was then sent the PDF of the catalogue as the basis for the project affiliated with EBBA. By 2019 most of the ballads in the catalogue were already digitised but across many different collections. Bringing them together resulted in the warrior women website which was developed through a graduate seminar.

Probably the most inspirational talk of the conference was Carl Stahmer on EBBA as a Digital Humanities project: “Representation Beyond Anecdotal Literary Criticism: Revisiting EBBA through Quantitative Analysis of Semantic Webs of Multimodal Printed Early Modern English Broadside Ballads”. He opened by commenting that digital humanities and EBBA grew up together, suggesting that EBBA is the exemplary D.H. project. He pointed out that human capacity is limited. This is a fundamental problem in the humanities. We cannot read it all. This poses problems and creates the limits of what we can do. Despite all the bells and whistles, this is the most important part of D.H. The real scholarship is the nuts and bolts of preparing the data for the project. He described the workflow of digital humanities projects and then described some of the areas on which the EBBA DH team is currently working which sound incredibly exciting and will allow us to do some amazing work on the ballads, tunes and images, which up to now we’ve not been able to see in anything but an anecdotal fashion.

Then there was a roundtable: “Hear ye, Hear ye; The Old Ballad Team Made Anew” in which members of the present and original EBBA team reminiscing about their memories of the project. They talked about how working at EBBA had changed their education and influenced their teaching, as well as discussing their favourite memories. The conference proper closed with a reception, in which we chatted over drinks and canapés.

After the reception, I went for dinner in Downtown Santa Barbara with some of the other delegates. You’ll notice we’re wrapped up sitting under patio heaters – and we were still pretty chilly! Booking a meal outdoors had seemed a good idea at the time (not that it was mine!), but no one had expected the weather to be as bad as it was!

On Sunday morning I headed back to Downtown Santa Barbara to have a wander round and do a bit of shopping, before I headed back to the airport for the long flight home. On the coach back to LA, I listened to Ocean Drive by the Lighthouse Family. It seemed appropriate somehow.