Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is opening once more to the public. Once on the list of the 100 most endangered heritage sites in the world, this “fantasy of the middle ages” is set to open in October.

The Guardian article is here.

And fantastic slide show here.

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce that it has received a three-year Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The editors and staff are grateful for the support it provides as we pursue several new goals that constitute the  fourth phase of our development:

• to enhance our user interface with new features and tools;
• to  move Blake’s unique manuscripts and rare typographical works from early development into our  normal production schedule until we are in a position to publish scholarly editions of The Four Zoas and Blake’s Notebook, two extremely significant, complex, and fragile manuscripts in the British Library;
• to prepare twenty or more illuminated books and sets of prints, drawings, and paintings for publication;
• to encode nearly 1000 images (paintings, engravings, drawings) so that they are searchable;
• to add about 500 new digital images to the 5650 images currently in the Archive;
• and to encode and incorporate forty years of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, the journal of record in Blake studies, into the Archive. (For further information, see our Plan of the Archive.)

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager

William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

We’re extremely excited to announce the publication of our first article! Our essay, “‘Productions of time’: Visions of Blake in the Digital Age” appears in a great special volume about editing and reading Blake.

Romantic Circles is please to announce the publication of Editing and Reading Blake, a new volume in our Praxis series. Co-edited by Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, this collection of essays looks at the profound challenges William Blake poses to both editors and readers. Despite the promises of the current multi-modal environment, the effort to represent Blake’s works as he intended them to be read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also illuminates much in Blake’s corpus, and more remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple with past, present, and future attempts at editing Blake’s idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using numerous forms of media.

Ripley’s introduction attempts to tell the history of editing Blake from the perspective of editorial remediation. Essays by W. H. Stevenson, Mary Lynn Johnson, and David Fuller, all of whom have edited successful print editions of Blake’s works, reflect on the actual work of editing and explore how the assumptions underlying editorial practices were challenged by publishers, new ideas of editing, new forms of technology, and ideas of audience. Recognizing that editorial work is never done, the volume also includes the indispensable errata to the 2008 edition of Grant and Johnson’s Blake Designs. Essays by current and past project assistants to the Blake Archive, Rachel Lee, J. Alexander McGhee, Ripley, and Van Kleeck, examine the difficulties that Blake’s heavily revised manuscripts, such as An Island in the Moon and Vala or The Four Zoas, and Blake’s illustrations of other authors, have posed both to editors working in print and to the ever-evolving Blake Archive.

The volume can be found here:
https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/editing_blake/index.html

Transcribe Bentham, the first crowdsourced transcription project, launched this week. From the project blog:

The Transcribe Bentham crowdsourcing initiative officially launched today. Our Transcription Desk is now open to the public and we encourage everyone to have a go at transcribing Jeremy Bentham’s papers! We welcome all contributions and all thoughts on anything relating to Bentham and the project in general. You are warmly encouraged to explore the site, create a profile and post comments on our discussion board. Tell us about your favourite Bentham quote or invented word! Gain points for your contributions to move up our progress ladder and become a transcribing prodigy! Track the progress of transcription by viewing the Benthamometer.

There are tips for paleography and a list of top contributors.

I cannot wait to see this project unfold! I am wondering how well the progress ladder will incentivize participation, and I’m curious about the evolution of transcription and encoding policies as a result of complexities in the manuscripts.

As a project assistant for the Blake Archive, I’ve seen how problems and questions about transcribing push the development of editorial decisions and the policies governing transcription, encoding, and the transcription display. We’ve had many disagreements and discussions about punctuation marks, spellings, whether a stray mark was a comma, whether an inkblot was a deletion, how to display the pages of a letter (should the address first or last?), and how to best represent revisions in the display. We’ve also had to modify our tag set, such as which elements to use, or how to define particular attributes, as we encounter problems and make these editorial decisions.

The project utilizes aspects of social networking (such as user profiles and friends), and I am curious about the community which might develop around such a project. Though transcribing is often solitary work, WBA assistants do work closely on specific problems or projects, attend weekly meetings, and post questions to the listserv. In essence, the WBA has depended upon email and staff meetings to facilitate long-distance editing, but it seems that a discussion board (which is already active at Transcribe Bentham) might work just as well.

As an experiment in how digital scholarly editions/archives/documentary editing projects might integrate crowdsourcing, it’s an interesting vision of what participatory scholarship might look like.

A new exhibition at the Tate Britain celebrates the Romantics:

A major new nine-room display presents Romantic art in Britain, its origins, inspirations and legacies. Drawn from Tate’s collection, it showcases major works by Henry Fuseli, JMW Turner, John Constable and Samuel Palmer, as well as newly-acquired works by William Blake. From Turner’s reinvention of landscape to Blake’s visionary histories, the display reveals the imagination and innovations of a generation defined by belief in creative freedom, rather than tradition or style. In addition, two rooms look at the legacy of The Romantics, presenting work by Graham Sutherland and others.

The exhibition runs 9 August 2010  –  31 December 2012.

(via Zoamorphosis; Tate Britain)

Via the symposium website:

BLAKE IN OUR TIME

A Symposium Celebrating the Future of Blake Studies & the Legacy of G.E. Bentley Jr.

Saturday, August 28th, 2010
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY in the University of Toronto

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:
Robert N. Essick
Joseph Viscomi
Mary Lynn Johnson
Angus Whitehead
Featuring short illustrated papers & panel presentations.

FOR INQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT:
Professor Karen Mulhallen,
Ryerson University
kmulhall@ryerson.ca

There’s no charge, but registration is required. You can do that here!

The newest issue of RaVoN contains an article by Harriet Kraner Linkin on Blake and the American poet Lucy Hooper.

Lucy Hooper, William Blake, and “The Fairy’s Funeral”

Harriet Kramer Linkin
New Mexico State University

Abstract
The American poetess and abolitionist Lucy Hooper (1816-1841) was the first North American to publish a poem inspired by Blake’s prophetic imagination, “The Fairy’s Funeral” (1833), which transforms the famous anecdote about Blake witnessing a fairy funeral into a visionary lyric. This essay provides a brief introduction to Hooper, perhaps best-known as the subject of Whittier’s elegy “On the Death of Lucy Hooper” (1841), situates her in a literary milieu of British Romantic poets that includes Hemans, Landon, Byron and Clare, discusses how an American poetess from Brooklyn might have learned about Blake and his work, and reads “The Fairy’s Funeral” as a critique of Blake’s often violent representation of fairies and flowers.

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of 20 of Blake’s water color illustrations to the Bible. They are presented in a new category in the Archive’s main Table of Contents, “Illustrations to the Bible, c. 1780-1824,” under Drawings and Paintings, Water Color Drawings. These designs illustrate the Old Testament and are arranged according to the passages illustrated. They are presented in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (which provides detailed descriptions of Blake’s images).

The Bible had an enormous influence on Blake’s work as both artist and poet. Among his many and complex responses to that text are water color drawings. The present group of 20 is selected from a sequence of about 80 biblical water colors of similar size that Blake painted for Thomas Butts between c. 1800 and c. 1806. These designs emphasize interactions between the human and the divine. In works such as Ezekiel’s Wheels and David Delivered Out of Many Waters, the interaction is revelatory or redemptive. In other designs, including Pestilence: The Death of the First-Born, the relationship between God and humankind devolves into punishment and destruction.

Pestilence: The Death of the First-Born (Butlin 442)

This group of water colors is the first installment in our publication of a large selection of Blake’s water color drawings illustrating the Bible. In coming months we will publish a group of New Testament illustrations also from the series executed for Butts. Later we will add early works, such as Abraham and Isaac, datable to c. 1780, and continue through Blake’s final biblical water colors, including Moses Placed in the Ark of the Bulrushes of c. 1824.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager

William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive