BAND | Hell’s Printing Press

Transcribe what you…read?

24 September 2014

As Eric discussed last week, a group of us have been working on Vala, or The Four Zoas : a project that has been occupying a large chunk of my emotional and intellectual energy lately. It’s pretty intimidating to tackle a work that is notoriously difficult and the realisation that our early transcription attempts break the way that the Archive currently handles and displays text has been disheartening. However, looking on the bright side, pushing a system to its limits actually helps you to understand it more fully, which not only affects future work but has helped me to think more deeply about past and current projects.

BAND, XML

Toe the Line: Defining (Part 1)

10 September 2014

One of the main ways that we organize Blake Archive works while encoding is through “line groups”, an element represented by <lg> in our BADs (Blake Archive Description). Here’s the formal definition from our documentation:

<lg>. This element identifies line groups–i.e., blocks of text on the object, such as stanzas or paragraphs. For verse, simply use <lg>, but for prose text (i.e., not poetry), use the type with value “prose”: e.g., <lg type=”prose”>.

As BAND has been preparing typographic works for publication, we have encountered a number of new transcription, display and encoding problems related to “secondary text” (discussed most recently by Eric here and Megan here) including one that questions the status of our beloved <lg>. So, riddle me this Ye Transcription Gods, if poetry is <lg> and prose is <lg type=”prose”>, then what is text that is neither poetry nor prose? For example, most of our typographic works include a running header across the top of the page, how should we categorize that?

BAND

Herding Cats

3 September 2014

Changes in the weather, conspicuous coffee consumption, two or three return trips to Staples–the advent of a new semester can mean many things. The Great Leveler in academia, of course, is scheduling. We must be many places at many times, and we forever must coordinate ourselves against the variables (and the universe, in general, that conspires against us).

BAND

Reality Bites: everyday work and the Digital Humanities

27 August 2014

The funny thing about digital projects is that in addition to their online presence, they also exist in the real world. We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year increasing our web-based activity (this blog, twitter, participating in Day of DH and so on) but as we approach the start of the new academic year, I find myself confronting problems that are real, tangible, material. For example, how on earth can I find a time when twelve busy people are all available to meet? And even if that’s possible, where are we going to meet? Is the summer construction around the office going to be finished in time for the new semester? And why is the carpet in our office permanently wrinkled (a question I lose sleep over because I’m worried that someone’s going to trip over and do themselves a horrible injury)?

BAND

Professional Level Proofing

20 August 2014

At the Blake Archive, we strive for god-like workmanship. As such, proofreading for sinful mistakes is an important step in our process. Currently, we have several publications “on-deck” for publishing, but this means that several eyes have to pass over those documents. I am currently proofing a typographical work called Poetical Sketches.

BAND

Blake Camp 2014: Day 2

15 August 2014

Continued from Wednesday’s post, Part 1 Recap of Blake Camp 2014. Also see Morris’s Brief History of Blake Camp.

DAY 2, Friday 14 June

Session 5

E-books, Search Terms, and New Image Sources

We begin with a long discussion of the pros and cons of issuing e-book editions of works in the Archive—focusing perhaps on developing Blake’s most popular and widely studied works in responsive portable formats. Among many other issues discussed are the thorny problems of copyright.

BAND

Blake Camp 2014: Day 1

13 August 2014

Blake Camp 21, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Highlights Part 1

I began with a brief history of Blake Camp—a bit of how-we-live-and-what-we-live-for to explain why it’s such a durable institution, marking the end of one Blake Archive year and the start of the next, BBC to ABC.

This year we met at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the lounge of the English department—on Thursday and Friday, 12-13 June. As always, attendees varied from session to session depending on the subject. They included editors Morris Eaves, Bob Essick, and Joe Viscomi; bibliographer Mark Crosby; project manager Joe Fletcher; our new technical editor Mike Fox; special projects consultant Ashley Reed; and project assistant Adam McCune. Laura Whitebell, the project coordinator at the University of Rochester, attended via Google video chat.

BAND

A Brief History of Blake Camp

11 August 2014

“Blake Boyz” and “Blake Camp” are sticky labels that John Unsworth invented in the early years of the Archive. This June Blake Camp celebrated its 21^st birthday—or maybe its 19^th or 20^th, depending on how you count, because the label came a bit later than the annual gathering of the principal participants.

To understand what Blake Camp—the annual pivot point for our project—is and how it got that way, a little history is helpful.

BAND

Introducing: Blake’s French Revolution

23 July 2014

A couple of us at the Blake Archive have taken on Blake’s 1791 poem French Revolution as a new typographic project. We use many of the same principles established in early publications of typographic works. Thus, after working out some important typographic questions on the Descriptive Catalog, the French Revolution transcription appears to be fairly straightforward.