Digital Humanities | Hell’s Printing Press

Little Boys Lost

20 January 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, Digital Humanities

Subjective Image Processing?

30 September 2016

In my role as Assistant Project Manager, I respond to the many requests for reproducing content from the William Blake Archive, of which the overwhelming majority are for images (a surprise to me). One of the most memorable request so far was a patron asking if he could screen-print one of the images on his home stereo cover. While this was a strange request and much different than the normal reproduction requests for publication, it tells us that the images in the archive contain a tremendous power outside of academic use. I wondered how I can locate that power.

BAND, Digital Humanities, Uncategorized

Why we should be talking more: office chat and DH

6 July 2016

When I look back over many of the most recent blog posts—Rachel’s about how to use notes with a sense of audience, Oishani’s about Blake’s quirky punctuation, my own about the differences between red wax seals and wafers, and other posts from the past several months—I am not surprised to realize that many of these posts began in the William Blake Archive office as informal conversations about digital editing. I remember Oishani asking my input about how to encode a period under a superscript, and I recall spending the better part of an hour with Laura and Lisa discussing why and how we decide that a letter is sealed by wax or wafer. These conversations are illustrative of one of the greatest benefits of digital humanities projects: the opportunity to collaborate and work with a team of scholars from a variety of backgrounds.

BAND, Digital Humanities

One Size Fits None

15 June 2016

An article has just been published in the very first issue of the new journal, Digital Literary Studies called “Encoding the Edge: Manuscript Marginalia and the TEI” by Laura Estill. Nothing could be more timely, given BAND’s new project to encode Blake’s marginalia, and I’m sure that we’ll be referring to this paper over and over again as we press on with our task.

Blake Quarterly, Digital Humanities

“Swift winged words”: the vocabulary and word distribution of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly

1 April 2016

In the process of preparing the team to correct spelling errors in the digital archive of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (errors in the transcription and in the original print version), I have made a few interesting observations about word distribution in the BIQ corpus (before the first online issues). On the principle that misspellings occur less frequently than correct spellings, I used a series of PHP scripts to generate a wordlist sorted by the number of instances of each unique word. The team is beginning by checking the spellings of rare words (appearing 1-3 times in the whole print-only run of BIQ), in hopes of encountering a higher percentage of errors more efficiently. The word list itself, however, tells us some interesting things about the word choices of Blake scholars.

BAND, Digital Humanities, Uncategorized

Managing Marginalia: Two Ways

16 February 2016

We are experiencing Real Winter Weather for the first time this season, so it seems apt that BAND are about to re-visit a project that kept us occupied last time the snow fell and the mercury plummeted: Blake’s marginalia.

As Lisa discussed last winter, one of the projects that we have yet to tackle fully is the annotations that Blake made in books from his own collection, a unique and challenging combination of a manuscript and a typographical work. This week, we’ll be holding the first meeting of Team Marginalia, a similar kind of working group as Team Color Code, who will be focusing on the specific problems that this kind of work poses.

BAND, Digital Humanities

Building better ‘Bus Projects’

17 December 2015

I learned a great new phrase at Blake Camp this year: ‘Bus Project’. This is a project that you are in charge of, but that anybody else could take over in the unlikely (and of course, tragic) event that you get squashed by a bus. Usually, this means that you keep comprehensive notes, talk to your colleagues and generally leave a long and detailed paper trail everywhere you go.

BATS, Digital Humanities, XML

Scholars and their tools: building the digital archive of BIQ

3 December 2015

When I began working on the digital archive of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, the vast scale of the project—over 2000 articles in multiple formats (PDF and either XML or HTML) published across nearly 50 years—made systemic corrections and adjustments very difficult.

BATS, Digital Humanities, Publications

Devouring the Prolific

19 November 2015

As the ongoing Phase Four of the Blake Archive’s development – image acquisition – continues, we realize that the excess of Blake’s delights will keep the Archive staff busy for years to come. Since we last posted about acquisitions in March, we have acquired the following works from nine institutions:

BAND, Digital Humanities

Blake In Photoshop, Part 3: Recovering Overwritten Text

12 November 2015

This fall I’ve been blogging about forensic experimentation with Blake Archive images in Adobe Photoshop. The idea is that Photoshop can be a [relatively] cheap, easy, and fast way to either answer transcription questions or allow editors to model alternate views of manuscript images for Archive users. In the last two posts, I’ve used examples of faded, hard-to-read text to illustrate the potential usefulness of digital image manipulation.

Interesting stuff, but also pretty conservative in terms of total image manipulation and Photoshop’s technical abilities. This week, we’re going to push the envelope . . . just a bit.