BATS | Hell’s Printing Press

Over-reading Overwriting? A Textual Anomaly in Songs of Innocence, Copy Q

March 9, 2018

Last year, I traded my work with archived issues of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly for new tasks in text and image markup of Blake’s illuminated books. Last month, I began writing markup “without a net,” as we say. With Katherine Calvin’s guidance, I am learning to describe individual watercolor drawings without recourse to a previous editor’s text. So, rather than thinking comparatively, I consider only the image at hand, and I have to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the body of search terms The Blake Archive uses to describe and tag images.

BATS

Do you see what I see?

February 15, 2018

Under the skilled eye of Katherine Calvin, I have completed training on illustration markup. With her help, I have gained practice in the art of seeing and of describing what I see, without inserting my interpretations. My introduction to the process of using templates to reflect on the new (to me) plate and spot the differences–a skill set that I first developed reading Highlights magazines–went smoothly. As I learned the ropes, there was only one instance where I thought the template itself was wrong.

BAND, BATS

Introducing Tutorial Videos

November 2, 2017

The William Blake Archive is on YouTube.

BATS

Teaching First-Year Composition with the William Blake Archive

October 16, 2017

I am happy to report that I have finished my last spellcheck list, and will be switching tasks to assist with image mark-up. Not an unwelcome “vicissitude,”

in the sense of the “Grateful vicissitude” of the perfectly-balanced changes from light to darkness that Milton describes in Paradise Lost. But I will miss the curiosities that I came across while checking Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly for spelling errors.

BATS

The Oxford Comma and the Rogue Apostrophe: Editorial Principles and Punctuation in the Blake Archive

April 6, 2017

The Oxford comma is having its moment in the spotlight in recent news, after it was used to clinch a legal case in favor of the five drivers in O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy who, according to the interpretation of policy in the absence of the comma, were therefore found to be eligible for overtime pay. And grammar geeks on the side of the Oxford comma have been rejoicing.

BATS

Blake’s Aniconic Arboreals

April 4, 2017

“What if God was one of us?” asks singer-songwriter Joan Osborne. It’s actually not that hard to imagine God as a person. Many are familiar with the image of God as the deity appears in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam: an old, imperious man with flowing hair and beard. For many raised in Judeo-Christian traditions, the portrayal of Alanis Morissette as God in the movie Dogma is as far from that image as the imagination strays. Beyond this narrow anthropomorphism, however, lie countless aniconic representations of divinity.

BATS

“Lunging” and Other Bodily Contortions: The Textual Tracking of Visual Motifs, Part III

March 30, 2017

Always interested in the intersections of language and visual representation, in this post I examine the variety of bodies—and range of bodily contortions—encompassed under the single search term “lunging” as a continuation of my series on WBA text tags (see my earlier posts about textual tagging broadly and “streams of gore”).

BATS, Digital Humanities

Little Boys Lost

January 20, 2017

A few years ago I was having drinks with someone I had recently met through an interdisciplinary research/reading group at the University of North Carolina. He was a geneticist. In the course of our conversation he confided that he no longer read books, especially those books having to do with literature. Since everything reduced to genetic coding, which revealed itself in its own inscrutable (to me, even though he tried to explain it) language, all macrocosmic products of human artistry were epiphenomenal, superfluous. We were just humming flesh lumps elaborately but programmatically spun out from inherited scripts. He stared hard into his ice cubes as he said this. I’d quote him, but I can’t remember his exact words.

BATS, XML

Sisyphus and Consistency

November 4, 2016

My recent projects as Editorial Assistant at the William Blake Archive have shared a mission: to ensure the consistency of the Archive’s text. My last project was to go through the Blake Archive Documents (BADs) and capitalize the C’s, P’s, and O’s in the words “Copy,” “Plate,” and “Object” (and their plurals) whenever they refer to specific copies, plates, or objects. My current project is to enter Bob Essick’s revisions to the lists of related works for each object, so that when the redesigned Archive is unveiled, it will have the most comprehensive, accurate, and consistent information possible.

BATS

Preview of the Technical Summary for the Blake Archive’s New Site

October 18, 2016

The Blake Archive will soon be launching its new site, housed on UNC servers. Here is a preview of the site’s Technical Summary:

System Architecture and Basic Front-End Navigation

The new Blake Archive site does not use some of the technologies that the old site did, such as Java and ImageSizer, and the entire architecture of the old site’s web application has been replaced. The new application is divided into four parts: the site proper, meaning our archive of Blake’s works; a collection of back issues from Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly; our blog; and The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake edited by David Erdman.