Digital Humanities | Hell’s Printing Press

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.

Digital Humanities, Guest Post, Uncategorized

Slaying the Demon King: William Blake and Urizen in Devil May Cry 5

7 July 2021

Julian S. Whitney
Wabash College

Video games have become a popular medium in which to feature excerpts from Romantic poetry. The 2019 post-apocalyptic action game developed by Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding, originated with a 2016 reveal trailer that showcased a short excerpt from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.”^[1] Likewise, the 2014 side-scrolling exploration game titled Elegy for a Dead World requires its players to write a diary based on their exploration through three worlds inspired by the literature of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats.^[2] These video games incorporate Romantic poetry as a way to contextualize, thematize, and construct the narrative and mechanical aspects of their respective designs. But what happens when a video game appropriates certain mythological elements of Romanticism and integrates them into the foundation of its own story?

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:

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.

BAND, Digital Humanities

Insights from a Doubly Digital Humanist

8 November 2019

This semester I enrolled in a course entitled “Digital History: Historical Worlds, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Museums”— thoroughly intrigued by the course’s description which promised to teach me to “harness emerging technologies to educate the public about the past.” It seemed familiar, yet distant enough from my existing skill set to be rewarding.

BAND, Digital Humanities, XML

Songs of Innocent XML

6 November 2019

The top of the XML tree for William Blake, An Island in the Moon, Copy 1 (1784–85), page 1, www.blakearchive.org/bad/bb74.1.xml.

One of my responsibilities as an Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow at the University of Rochester is contributing to an established digital humanities project. For that reason, I am the newest member of the Blake Archive North Division team. While I do not have a background in William Blake’s works or those of his contemporaries, I study U.S. religious and cultural history, so Blake’s talk of a unity in religion and his flirtation with Swedenborg’s tiered heaven echo what I’ve read in American sources. Blake’s visions are wild and, unlike many religious innovators, he actually drew and painted them.

BAND, Digital Humanities

A Watermark Mystery

24 April 2019

Sometimes in archival work, you find yourself on these “side quests,” tracking down a paradoxically indispensable yet trivial bit of information. Such a quest came up after the last round of receipt proofing. A member of the Archive noticed that a handful of the receipts had watermarks with a range of visibility. Receipt number 26 had a particularly faint watermark that evaded straightforward identification. As this information—when present—is typically included in the publications, it was necessary to figure out if this watermark was visible enough to describe.

BAND, Digital Humanities, Holiday

“I heard a Devil curse”: Blake and Halloween

26 October 2018

It’s about time for Halloween for the Northern Division of the Blake Archive, and as the numerous Victorian houses of downtown Rochester begin to assume their position amidst the eerie late-October sky, a Blake enthusiast can’t help but wonder where the poet fit into all the ghostly proceedings.

BAND, Digital Humanities

From William Seward to William Blake—and Back Again: Lessons Learned from the William Blake Archive

3 May 2018

As part of my duties as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities, I am required to serve as a Research Assistant for one of the many digital humanities projects at the University of Rochester. I was drawn to the William Blake Archive for several reasons. First, the Archive is a foundational DH project. Its depth and multi-institutional workflow serve as a model for onlookers hoping to recreate a successful digital collaboration. Selfishly though, I was also drawn to the William Blake Archive with an intent to gain more experience in XML, TEI, and digital-documentary editing. I hoped to adapt elements of the William Blake Archive for a more recent digital project ongoing at the University of Rochester, the Seward Family Digital Archive.