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BAND, Digital Humanities, Uncategorized

The Mystery and Magic of Photo Processing

20 May 2022

I’m lucky enough to have some hidden skills in Adobe Photoshop, and they’ve become quite useful every now and again on the Blake Archive. Photos of manuscripts, though high resolution, still present visual challenges when it comes to identifying near-invisible features like erasures, corrections, and other odd quirks. And while we’re trained to be extremely observant and thorough when analyzing a manuscript, the magic of image-processing software can give us an advantage.

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BAND

Reflections

18 November 2021

My name is Esther and I’m an undergraduate student working for the William Blake Archive. I joined in January of this year. At first, I was working on the transcription for bb35.1.1 and bb35.1.2 of The Everlasting Gospel. After it was decided that the transcription didn’t have a place on the website right now, I transferred over to helping maintain the site’s collection lists.

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BAND, Holiday

A Blakean Jack-O’-Lantern

29 October 2021

For a little seasonal fun, myself and a couple of friends took some time to carve pumpkins! Admittedly, it had been quite a while since I took up such a task. And “pumpkin” isn’t exactly my medium of choice. I was a studio art major in undergrad and as a painter by trade, I avoided sculpture classes like the plague. Despite all this, I am not one to back down from a crafting challenge, which ensured that I took on a far too ambitious project. Particularly considering that said pumpkin will (and is) deteriorating as I write.

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BAND, Digital Humanities

Ginsberg’s Memories of Blake’s Sunflower

8 April 2021

Recently, while looking for inspiration for a poetry assignment, I revisited one of my favorite poems, Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra.” I always loved this poem for its energy and relentless optimism. After arriving at a dock and sitting “under the huge shade of a Southern/Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the/box house hills and cry,” Ginsberg sees a dead sunflower and goes into a fit of emotions, ending with the cheery declaration, “we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.” But this journey is not easy. Before Ginsberg’s uplifting conclusion, we’re first taken through a sort of microcosm of the industrial wasteland that is America:

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BAND, Digital Humanities

The Emendations in Poetical Sketches

19 March 2021

Blake’s earliest work, Poetical Sketches, is printed in a typographically traditional way, which made reproducing a digital edition of Sketches a little anomalous. Noting and describing Blake’s handwritten emendations and other printing errors initiated questions that went beyond typical Archive standards.

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BAND, XML

Languages and Ligatures

10 July 2020

One of the first blog posts I ever wrote for Hell’s Printing Press was titled “Laocoön and Languages.” The inspiration behind the post was that, in working on textual transcriptions, I had come across instances where Blake writes in a language other than English and I had been pointed to Laocoön as an example of a published Blake Archive work that deals with the problem of how to transcribe text in languages other than English.

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