Category
ASECS 2025 (Held Online)
Round Table: The Legacies of Morris Eaves
Co-Chairs: Wayne Ripley, Winona State University, wripley@winona.edu; Tom Hothem, University of California, Merced, thothem@ucmerced.edu.
Weekend: March 28/29
Continue readingRecollections and appreciations of Morris Eaves from colleagues, friends, and the Blake community.
Continue readingI’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.
Continue readingIt has been about three years since the first video in what is now a series of video tutorials on the various features of the Blake Archive was uploaded to YouTube. It has been a little over a year since I completed the first of the handful that I would eventually write and record. Making these videos has been an interesting and valuable experience, and in the process I’ve learned a lot about microphones, screen recording, and perseverance. The original spreadsheet of video ideas from which we have been working is nearing completion and another video ideas brainstorming session is likely in order.
Continue readingJulian 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?
Continue readingfrom Noah Heringman
On June 24, the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (USC) together with the Society of Antiquaries of London will publish a digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta [Ancient Monuments], the antiquarian print series produced by the Society of Antiquaries from 1718-1906.
Continue readingI am working on a book on E. D. Hirsch, who made some controversial contributions to Blake studies in the 1960s.
Continue readingIn previous posts on Hell’s Printing Press, I have explored the process of illustration markup and textual tagging at the WBA (see my earlier posts about textual tagging broadly and focused studies of tags like “streams of gore,” “lunging,” and “ecstasy”). In addition to tags related to objects, movements, and emotions, the WBA also aims to identify particular figures significant to Blake’s works and life. These include historical figures, such as Catherine Blake and George Romney; biblical characters including Potiphar and Job; and allegories like Mirth and Joy. However, one of the most important groups of tagged figures are characters created by Blake—from Oothoon and Los to Rintrah and Orc—who often recur throughout his poetry and designs.
Continue readingMy contributions to Hell’s Printing Press typically investigate aspects of my own job at the WBA—illustration markup—and focus on the process of textual tagging (see my earlier post about textual tagging broadly as well as studies of the tags “streams of gore” and “lunging”). Assigning tags from our list of terms is both an illuminating and challenging process as Blake continually experimented with new iconography, forms, and materials. Tagging specific figures from literature, religion, and Blakean mythology often involves research to identify characters such as Lamech, Libicoco, and the “nameless shadowy female.” However, some of the most difficult tags to assign, I have found, are those associated with mental states and emotions.
Continue readingSeven months ago I wrote a blog titled “Some Promising Forays into Transcribing Blake’s Marginalia.” Much has changed!
After months of grappling with the logistical and philosophical challenges involved in marginalia transcription, we now have what we think will be the actual marginalia tag-set moving forward (though to be sure, there are a few questions we’re saving for Blake Camp).
As a follow up to the “Promising Forays” I want to provide a brief quasi-narrative description of how we got from point A to point B.
Continue reading