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Transcribing Tiriel, Part II

25 January 2013

In my earlier blog post on Tiriel, I discussed the issue of reading Blake’s hand with regard to the word “seald” in object 1. Here, I discuss another problem that I faced in transcribing this manuscript. Again, the reading that will be found on the Blake Archive is at odds with those of David Erdman and G. E. Bentley, Jr.

In object 10, line 25 of Tiriel, Blake first mentions the name of Tiriel’s youngest daughter. This name eventually evolves into “Hela” at the end of object 11. However, Blake originally had another name in mind, which he used in object 10 and in part of object 11, before going back and making emendations to that name. Blake’s (often inventive) names pose a problem– that examples such as those from my last blog post do not– in that textual context provides no clue as to what the word/name in question might be. Fortunately, in the case of the “Hela” problem, Blake writes the name several times (there are some instances in which an illegible name appears only once), giving the transcriber a variety of examples to examine.

Here is an image of the name taken from object 10, line 25:

Erdman (in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake) suggests that the name “Hela” was originally written as “Hili”, noting that “the first vowel is conjectural, but is not ‘e'” (815n). Bentley (in William Blake’s Writings) claims that the ‘e’ in “Hela” “is faulty, as if it were an ‘a’ which has been written over” (914n). He does not offer a reading of the final letter of the name, which Erdman correctly states is also mended. Presumably, Bentley reads the first version of the name as “Hala”.

In reviewing objects 10 and 11 of the Tiriel manuscript, I came to favor a combination of Bentley’s and Erdman’s readings with regard to the initial version of “Hela”. I agree with Erdman that the last letter of the name—which is (contrary to Bentley’s description) clearly mended– was originally an “i”. If you look at the following samples (from 10.27, 11.2, 11.4, and 11.7) as well as that above, you can—in each instance– discern smudge marks above the final letter in the name:

These are the dots of “i”s that have been erased (with varying degrees of success) by rubbing. In fact, the dot in the third example above (from 11.4) is quite plain.

However, I do not agree with Erdman’s conjectural reading of the second letter of the initial version of the name as “i”. This is in part because the erasure marks that appear over the final letters in the examples above do not appear above the second letters. When I explained this reasoning to Rachel Lee, our Project Coordinator, she observed that the name may have been “Hili” and that Blake may not have dotted the first “i” because it would have interfered with the loop on the capital “H” preceding it. I shared Rachel’s concern because, in some cases—especially when a pen stroke from another letter (the cross stroke of a “t”, for example) occupies the space above an “i”—Blake will omit the dot. Therefore, I checked for instances of “i”s following capital “H”s elsewhere. In object 1, Blake writes “His” several times, dotting the “i” each time:

Therefore, “Hili” does not seem to be an accurate reading. Furthermore, based on the shape of the second letter in the name in the examples given, I believe that Bentley is correct when he suggests that the second letter in the name was originally an “a”. While the pen strokes in some of the examples above (such as 11.2) are not clear enough to provide a reading of the letter in question, others (particularly 10.27) are.

To better enable you to see my readings, in the first image, I traced the pen strokes making up the original letter, an “a”. In the second, I traced the emendation, an “e”.

Long story short, while Erdman reads the original version of “Hela” as “Hili” and Bentley reads “Hala”, I read “Hali”.

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Transcribing Tiriel

12 December 2012

In addition to the other issues surrounding textual transcription discussed in earlier posts, Blake Archive assistants involved in manuscript transcription often run into the basic problem of deciphering Blake’s hand. We are sometimes led to question established readings through a process that involves, not only being familiar with the usual way in which Blake forms particular letters, but also the way in which he writes his letters on a particular manuscript page or the way his letters appear when written in a certain sequence. For example, here is line 31 from object 1 of the Tiriel manuscript (which will eventually be published on the Blake Archive):

G. E. Bentley, Jr. (in William Blake’s Writings, as well as his edition of Tiriel) and David Erdman (in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake) read this line as:

Look at my eyes blind as the orbless scull among the stones

The word in question is “scull”:

It is easy to see why Bentley and Erdman read this word as such. The first letter of the word is definitely an “s” and the fourth is an “l”. Furthermore, the last letter could be read as an “l” written over an accidental “d”. However, this example becomes more complicated when you take into account the fact that the second letter (which Bentley and Erdman read as “c”) resembles the way in which Blake writes the letter “e” when it follows the letter “s”. Look at the first “e” in the following image (the word is “serpents”, taken from object 1 of Tiriel):

The third letter in “scull” looks like a “u”. However, it could also be an “a” that is not fully closed at the top (in other words, the first and second upward strokes don’t meet). This actually happens elsewhere in this particular object (although the gap is not quite as pronounced). Note the first “a” in the first image below and the second “a” in the second:

Now, compare the “a”s above with the “u” in “thus” (also from the same object):

They are quite similar. This leaves us with a reading of “scull” as “seal_”. With regard to the last letter, I would suggest that—as opposed to Bentley’s and Erdman’s readings of (presumably) an “l” written over a “d”—we read the reverse or a “d” written over an “l”. The word in question then becomes “seald.” If this is the case, Blake wrote “seall” and then corrected himself. Now, “scull” is still a possibility (and will be noted in the eventual Archive publication). However, while it would be an easy slip for Blake to write “seall” (as in “seal”/present tense) when he meant to write “seald” (“sealed”/past tense), it is less likely (although, of course, still possible) that he would accidentally write the letter “d” at the end of the word “scull”/“skull”.

Finally, “seald” (like “scull”) makes sense in the context of the sentence. To paraphrase:

Look at my eyes, blind as the orbless/eyeless/dead sealed/interred/buried among the stones.

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Publication Announcement

2 December 2012

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of five of Blake’s tempera paintings on biblical subjects, eleven of his water color illustrations to the Bible, and one of his large color printed drawings, Hecate, or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. These works have been added to groups previously published. In addition, we have republished all the biblical temperas and water colors to add illustration descriptions and make their designs and inscriptions fully searchable.

The Bible had an enormous influence on Blake’s work as both artist and poet. His tempera paintings and water colors of biblical subjects, mostly created for his patron Thomas Butts beginning in 1799, are among Blake’s most important responses to that text. The tempera paintings now published are based on passages in the New Testament concerning the life of Jesus and his family. We are particularly pleased to include Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter, a well preserved but little known work recently acquired by the Mead Art Museum of Amherst College. The new group of water colors ranges from Numbers (Moses Striking the Rock) to two of Blake’s most powerful explorations of the apocalyptic sublime, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun and The Number of the Beast is 666, both based on Revelation. The Great Red Dragon from the Brooklyn Museum has received a good deal of contemporary attention because of its central role in Thomas Harris’s bestselling 1981 novel, Red Dragon, and the films of 1986 and 2002 based on it. The Archive now includes twenty-four tempera paintings and sixty-four water colors based on the Bible. All of Blake’s extant water color illustrations to Revelation are available.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (© Brooklyn Museum)

The publication of Hecate from the National Gallery of Scotland completes our presentation of Blake’s large color printed drawings, considered by some to be his greatest achievements as a pictorial artist. The Archive now contains all thirty traced impressions of the twelve subjects portrayed in the large color prints.

This publication includes works from several collections not previously represented in the Archive. Accordingly, we are also publishing Blake collection lists for the Brooklyn Museum, Mead Art Museum (Amherst College), National Gallery of Scotland, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and Rosenbach Museum and Library. These lists include all original works by Blake in their respective collections, not just those published in the Archive.

With this publication we have also implemented a technical improvement that reflects the Archive’s commitment to open-source digital humanities principles. By clicking on the “View XML Source File” link on Electronic Edition Information pages, users can now view the XML source code for any work in 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

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“Transcribe what you see,” or Happy Birthday, William Blake.

28 November 2012

The cornerstone of our transcription guidelines here at the Blake Archive is “transcribe what you see,” a maxim that usually helps us work through tricky editorial decisions to result in a version of the text that remains faithful to the shape of the original. What happens, though, when “transcribing what we see” does not have this desired effect, when the transcription is not only difficult to read, but bears little resemblance to the text that it is supposed to represent?

Take this example from The Four Zoas:

Looking at the first line, there appears to be an illegible erasure underneath the words “The Song of the Aged Mother,” which would seem to have been written at the same time as the clearly readable remainder of that line. The whole of the second line has been written over an erasure. This is how we would represent this using our current display:

By transcribing what we see, the first line has been moved over to the right, destroying the original shape of the page by creating an artificial indention, while the second line has been moved even further over. Even worse, neither line retains its spatial relationship with the other words on the page, and creates a transcription that is clunky and difficult to read.

This is only one of many similar situations from The Four Zoas, and as we begin working on more and more of Blake’s manuscripts, these questions will continue to recur. How can we find a solution that is both practical and elegant, but remains faithful to our promise to “transcribe what we see”?

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Transcribing Ruled Lines in Genesis

20 November 2012

Blake’s Genesis manuscript (c. 1826-27), one of our current projects, raises questions about how to transcribe ruled lines in an electronic edition. The manuscript contains many of these lines, which Blake drew in pencil before writing in the text. (In the last object, there are many ruled lines without text, as Blake hadn’t yet added it). To a large extent, we can capture the look of the ruled lines by using an underscore tag: <hi rend=”underscore”></hi>.

Here is a relatively straightforward example:

We have transcribed it like this:

But some ruled lines are less clear-cut because they are double or broken up, they bisect Blake’s text, or they appear above the text rather than below it:

We’ve been transcribing lines that appear above text as lines to themselves. A ruled line that bisects text could be rendered using a strikethrough, of course, but we already use a strikethrough to indicate deletions. At this stage, we’re supplementing our transcription with editors’ notes to explain special cases.

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“Mainstreaming” the Digital Humanities at the WBA

15 October 2012

The Blake Archive gets a shout-out in John Unsworth’s blog post about the history of the digital humanities.

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Day of Digital Archives: Still Here

12 October 2012

This Day of Digital Archives is a rare chance to pause for remembrance and thanksgiving. I thank

Jerry McGann, who in 1992 took me aside in the lobby of some nondescript building at Texas A&M during a conference, Textual Technologies—the first time I ever heard the word “hypertext” and even went to some artist’s demonstration of how it might work—and described a new . . . something—at the University of Virginia designed to put computer people and humanists together to solve the problems of the latter. And he wondered if creating electronic versions of Blake’s illuminated books might not be a right kind of problem. I said I didn’t know, but I’d talk it, whatever it might be, over with Bob Essick and Joe Viscomi, with whom I was happily collaborating on a volume—in print—of Blake’s Illuminated Books.

Bob Essick and Joe Viscomi, who, in the garden of the Brooklyn brownstone of the late Karl Kroeber in the summer of 1993, patiently, bravely, and skeptically chewed collectively on our raw, ignorant ideas about an electronic Blake—which would somehow have something to do with what computers could accomplish.

John Unsworth, who as the just-appointed first director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at UVa, drove up from North Carolina in the summer of 1993 to meet with the three of us, who drove down from Brooklyn to Virginia to discuss with him what electronic form the works of William Blake might conceivably take. Nobody, as far as I remember, mentioned the World Wide or any other Web. But I not sure I’d remember it even if I had heard about it.

The World Wide Web, which appeared like a vision in a cloud called Mosaic in 1993. I didn’t have it much less use it and neither, I think, did Joe or Bob. But having it there, wherever there was, made all the difference in the long run. By the time it got to us, it was Netscape.

The Getty Grant Program, which thought the William Blake Archive—more name than plan—might at least be good as a test case for the applications that were beginning to flood in asking for real money to do electronic things with art. The program actually gave IATH real money for us to get something going in three years, 1995-1998.

Digital Archives Day 2012. Still here. Still wondering at least once a week where, how, or if the Blake Archive will be in 2025 or 2112.

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Day of Digital Archives: Joe Fletcher, Project Manager in Training

12 October 2012

The William Blake Archive offices at UNC-Chapel Hill are on the fifth floor of Greenlaw Hall, where it is still hot in October. After riding my bike to campus, I first turn on the little fan clipped to the bookshelf beside my desk and let the meager stream of air coax me into a more presentable state. This is my time to respond to the Archive’s email messages—usually requests from scholars, sometimes from artists, to reproduce images in the Archive. When I send along a high-resolution image, for which reproduction permission has been granted and the transaction documented on one of the Archive’s many tracking sheets, I always pause to admire Blake’s work, which makes my work somewhat slower, but more enjoyable.

Then I go next door to coordinate with Ashley Reed, the Archive’s Project Manager, under whom I have been training for the past year and a half, and whose skills at the position I can only hope to approximate. We discuss the status of the Archive’s various workflows—color-correcting images, image mark-up (tagging), transcription, changes to some of the Archive’s website features, our publication schedule—all of which are being handled by the nineteen members of the Archive working in various geographic and mental states. Often this coordinating session will involve a video conference with Rachel Lee, who, with Archive editor Morris Eaves, oversees the encoding of Blake’s manuscript work at the Archive’s office at the University of Rochester. The Luddite in me is still amazed every time I see the shared Google doc that serves as our weekly video conference agenda transform on one of the two screens before Ashley and me as Rachel types in the agreed-upon resolution to an agenda item from her Rochester office, while she simultaneously discusses the next agenda item with us and maintains eye contact through the other monitor.

Then I step across the hall to meet with Archive editor Joseph Viscomi regarding recently acquired images in need of titling and cataloging according to Archive protocol, a task that has fallen to me over the past several months. As a literature graduate student who studies Blake, it’s a task that seems more like a privilege. Questions concerning proper titling or cataloguing will sometimes necessitate an email to California, where the Archive’s third editor, Robert N. Essick, lives and works. I’m no physicist, and I know there is a time difference between North Carolina and California, but I swear he sometimes responds to my inquiries before I’ve hit send. I want to remark on this phenomenon to Katie Carlson, who is at the next work station in an office shared by several Archive assistants, both graduate and undergraduate. But she is concentrating on color-correcting a digital image in Photoshop against a transparency illuminated by a lightbox next to her monitor. So I just continue titling and cataloging, and the glad day proceeds.

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Day of Digital Archives: Ashley Reed, Project Manager

12 October 2012

[This is my contribution to the Day of Digital Archives event. Since it’s meant to serve as both an introduction to the Blake Archive and a description of some of the work I do in support of the Archive, it may seem redundant to regular readers of this blog.]

My name is Ashley Reed and I’m the Project Manager of the William Blake Archive. The Blake Archive is a digital archive in perhaps the purest sense of the word: we provide high-quality digital editions of Blake’s works, accompanied by critical and scholarly tools to assist students, teachers, and researchers in their study of this multimedia artist. The site is publicly available, requiring no login and charging no subscription fees. Our most recent publications include digital editions of Blake’s Songs of Innocence copy G and Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy N.

The Blake Archive is published at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the majority of our staff are located, but we have collaborators at the University of Rochester (one of our co-sponsors, along with UNC), the University of California-Riverside, Kansas State University, and Duke University. The Archive’s founders and co-editors are Joseph Viscomi (UNC Chapel Hill), Morris Eaves (University of Rochester) and Robert Essick (University of California-Riverside).

I say the Blake Archive is digital “in the purest sense” because we are not the digital arm of a print archive; none of the Blake works that appear in the WBA are owned by the Archive (or by the universities that support us). Instead, we collaborate with the museums, galleries, and private collectors that own Blake’s works; they provide high-resolution digital images (or, in some cases, transparencies for scanning) that become part of our digital editions. (The copyright to the digital images remains with the owning institutions.)

As Project Manager of the Blake Archive my primary duty is overseeing the workflows that make our digital editions possible. This includes cataloguing incoming images (renaming them according to Blake Archive protocols and adding them to our internal tracking sheets); creating the Blake Archive Documents (BADs) that provide the XML scaffolding for our digital editions; overseeing assistants as they complete the tasks of image color correction, textual transcription, and illustration markup that optimize image quality and make our editions searchable by users; and collaborating with our Technical Editor Will Shaw and our technical consultant Joe Ryan to implement necessary changes to the Archive’s DTD and to our XSL transformations. Joe Fletcher, the Archive’s Project Manager-in-training, assists with many of these tasks, particularly image cataloguing.

In the spirit of the Day of Digital Archives, here’s a representative sample of the tasks I worked on this week:

Consulted with Joe Ryan, Joe Fletcher, and Will Shaw as we work to implement a technical improvement to the Archive: a viewer that will enable users to see the XML BADs behind our digital editions directly in their browser windows.

Uploaded to our internal development site the completed BADs for three of Blake’s water color drawings illustrating the Bible. These three drawings are part of a group of works to be published later this year; they can now be spot-checked by the editors and staff in preparation for publication.

Taught one of the assistants, Adair Rispoli, how to add new XML documents to the eXist database that supports our development site. The Archive will soon begin making back issues of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly available (free of charge) to users, and Adair is completing the XML tagging that will make these editions viewable and searchable. She is also replacing the black-and-white images that appeared in print issues of BIQ with links to the full-color images featured in the Blake Archive.

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WBA participates in Day of Digital Archives this Friday

11 October 2012

Members of the William Blake Archive staff will be participating in the annual Day of Digital Archives this Friday, October 12th. The Day of Digital Archives raises awareness of digital archives and the preservation activities they engage in. Check back here for posts from WBA staff members.

Information about the Day of Digital Archives can be found here.