Uncategorized

Working on Blake’s receipts has given many of us the occasion to think of small and easy-to-miss problems. Alison’s post about the stamps, demonstrating her detailed observation of their variations and intricacies, is a perfect example. The receipts are a fascinating place for speculation about the fluctuations of Blake’s income as well as a constant source of surprising relief about his consistently neat and legible writing. In this post I thought I’d make a note of an interesting irregularity that I’ve encountered in all the receipts I’ve transcribed: Blake’s placement of the period. When writing “Mr.”, Blake often places the period or a colon in the same space under a superscript “r”:

This phenomenon is difficult to transcribe, and the standard references don’t deal with this problem in a systematic way. In a BAND meeting, we decided to attach a note with each receipt discussing the specific usage and add anything that Bentley or Keynes might say about this, but there is often a  great deal of variation in Bentley and Keynes’ treatment of Blake’s punctuation. Sometimes Blake Records reproduces Blake’s writing exactly, but not always. Bentley often places the period or colon after the superscript, and Keynes omits it quite frequently. Thus, we have many nearly identical notes about minute differences in punctuation, but not much discussion of the fact that the differences in punctuation is such an important aspect of the receipts. This issue led me to think of two questions about how we could address this. First, would it be more useful to have individual notes on each of the receipts that have any such punctuations and record the varying transcriptions in each case, or to have a set of notes that cover the entire set of receipts and discuss recurring issues like interestingly placed periods in greater detail (and I’m thinking about the stamps here as well)? The second question is more generally about a particular project or publication: should a project like the receipts include a list of the issues encountered and the decisions they led to as an aid to others working in digital archiving?

Lately my task has been to comb through lists of words, generated by Adam McCune’s scripts that run through Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly to search for misspellings, a task which he recently described in another blog post. My section includes all unique terms that begin with lowercase s-z. I evaluate each word, particularly lingering on red squiggles that signal the unsanctified according to Microsoft Word. I time-travel through the journal as I investigate contexts for alphabetically-organized misspellings, reading blips of scholarship that span the past fifty years.

As Adam explained in last week’s post, the most recent task for many project assistants has been to search out misspelled words across extant Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly issues and make emendations where needed. While Microsoft Word provides the first indication of potential errors, we proceed line-by-line through wordlists and judge whether a word is actually misspelled or is merely unrecognized because of different linguistic origins or obsolete spelling variations. The wordlist on which I’ve been working these last few weeks contains every rare word beginning with capital letters I through R. To give you a sense of the size of this grouping, I’m still solidly in the “I” portion of a document 16,479 words long, a list containing everything from expressions of “Illustration” in four different languages to my own last name in the editorial matter beneath articles.

One of our most recent projects is the transcription of 44 receipts written and signed by William Blake. They present a few new problems, such as how to transcribe the markings between numbers — their version of a decimal point, which looks a lot like two commas. Another unique aspect is the stamp, which appears on 19 of the receipts. Initially there was uncertainty over how to classify the stamps, and they were referred to as ‘seals’ for a few months. However, consulting some reference works on philately told us that the correct term is ‘embossed revenue stamp’. These actually have a longer history than postage stamps, as they were used to denote the payment of tax on legal documents such as receipts, and before income tax became standard they were used by governments as a main source of revenue. They can be classed as either ‘documentary’ or ‘proprietary’; the latter describing stamps used for paying tax on goods, which are generally affixed to the item in question, and the former being stamps attached to legal documents. The Blake receipts carry documentary revenue stamps.

As we continue work on the redesign of the Archive, our collaborative efforts with programmers and web designers who are unfamiliar with Blake’s work reveal aspects of the Archive’s structure and organization that we take for granted. Our bi-weekly meetings often involve volleys of patient explication: the Blake folks (Joe Viscomi, Ashley Reed, Mike Fox, and myself) offer mini lessons on Blake’s multimedia production in order that the designers and programmers better understand the content they’re working with; and they in turn lecture us on the possibilities and constraints involved with the database structures, modified programming languages, etc. that will display that content.

One recent sticking point has been the concept of virtual groups.

Object 32 of The Four Zoas (BB.209) posed a number of curious problems. This was the first experience that Anna, Miles and I had with a Four Zoas object (actually, all Anna and I had tagged before this was a receipt), and so it was quite overwhelming. In this post, I want to focus on the word between “Urizen” and “Power”.

Alan Liu recently gave a talk at UNC-Chapel Hill entitled “Key Trends in Digital Humanities: How the Digital Humanities Challenge the Idea of the Humanities.” It culminated in a discussion of the hermeneutics of the digital humanities. He showed how certain long-standing epistemological modes, such as mimesis and similitude, have exploded into new modes in this new discipline. I want to explore one of those traditional modes, similitude, as it relates to the Blake Archive. At the front end of the Archive, the mode is familiar. At the back end, it becomes unrecognizable and forces one to rethink what it means at the front end.