Category

XML

BAND, XML

Languages and Ligatures

One of the first blog posts I ever wrote for Hell’s Printing Press was titled “Laocoön and Languages.” The inspiration behind the post was that, in working on textual transcriptions, I had come across instances where Blake writes in a language other than English and I had been pointed to Laocoön as an example of a published Blake Archive work that deals with the problem of how to transcribe text in languages other than English.

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BAND, Digital Humanities, XML

Songs of Innocent XML

The top of the XML tree for William Blake, An Island in the Moon, Copy 1 (1784–85), page 1, www.blakearchive.org/bad/bb74.1.xml.

One of my responsibilities as an Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow at the University of Rochester is contributing to an established digital humanities project. For that reason, I am the newest member of the Blake Archive North Division team. While I do not have a background in William Blake’s works or those of his contemporaries, I study U.S. religious and cultural history, so Blake’s talk of a unity in religion and his flirtation with Swedenborg’s tiered heaven echo what I’ve read in American sources. Blake’s visions are wild and, unlike many religious innovators, he actually drew and painted them.

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BAND, XML

A Few (Small) Hiccups with the Receipts

It’s been a while since the last update on the “Receipts Project,” and so I thought I’d share a quick summary of what we’re up to with these strange scraps of paper, which throw up the most unexpected of challenges despite their modest size. As the receipts are scheduled for publication early next year, we’re currently at the stage of proofing and revision, and trying to deal with the following issues:

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BAND, XML

A New Guide to Choice Tags

Last time I blogged about the <choice> Tag Project, I established a semi-comprehensive list of situations that required <choice> tags, and ended with a series of unsettled questions. Since then I have investigated the issue more thoroughly and now, having answered those questions, I can put together a more definitive guide. 

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BAND, XML

The Much-Anticipated Receipts Update

The previous occasion upon which we brought to your attention the documentation of Blake’s inimitable and exciting fiscal accounts was in mid-2016, so it’s about time we revisited the manifold problems plaguing the receipts project. The project has been gathering (only a little) dust while we paid attention to more pressing questions raised by the redesign, the Four Zoas display, the marginalia schema, not to mention the terrifying experience of recording tutorial videos! But, finally, the (all new) Receipts Team – comprising the brand new BAND member Emily Tronson, the not-so-new Alex Zawacki and myself – has reconvened and we’ve been trying to compile a list of objectives to guide our attempts to prepare a single, complete BAD with all the receipts in our possession. Here are some (hopefully) interesting thoughts and considerations we’ve come up with:

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BAND, XML

What I Learned from Researching Choice Tags

One of BAND’s long term projects is what we’re calling the <choice> Tag Project. The ultimate idea behind this project is to standardize our use of <choice> tags in textual transcriptions. Since there have been several blog posts written on this topic in the past, I thought a good way to begin would be to read those three posts and then to look through recently transcribed BADs in order to get a thorough exposure to all the different ways in which people are using <choice> tags.

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BAND, XML

William Blake’s letters: Date dilemma and Keynes’s commas

Bentley reads William Blake’s letter to Thomas Butts dated September, 23, 1800 as “22 September 1800” and makes a footnote explaining the same (1541). Similarly, another letter written to Butts dated January 10, 1802 is a matter of dispute and disagreement among scholars and editors. While the object (image— lt10jan1802.1.2.LT.300.jpg) itself says “January 10. 1802”, Erdman suggests it is 1803 and not 1802, and Keynes mentions both. When we were discussing this in our BAND meeting, Sarah recommended me a copy of “Blake/ An Illustrated Quarterly 51 Volume 13 Number 3 Winter 79-80”; I did find a brief note about this discrepancy in this issue (page 148). Then the concern was how and where should we address this in the XML file.

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BAND, XML

Trouble in paradise: our divergent uses of the new marginalia schema

In the excitingly titled “So then what happened?” Rob outlined some of the major changes that we’ve introduced to the marginalia schema, such as using specific <layer>s to differentiate between typographic text and Blake’s writing, dispensing with line numbers for the typographic text, and dividing the annotations into discrete zones with fluid spatial coordinates. Armed with these new and fascinating solutions, we decided to transcribe the marginalia BADs independently and to hold bimonthly update sessions to discuss our progress or talk about any specific problems that came up.

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BAND, XML

Do we know what we’re estimating?

One of many things that working on the separate plates has gotten me thinking about is how we conceptualize units of space. Doing the textual transcriptions for the separate plates requires that we use a lot of <space/> and <vspace/> tags. Inside these elements, we use the attribute “extent=” to describe the size of the space. The difficulty of this is that I never feel like I have any idea what it is we’re counting. It seems like the standard instruction in the matter is to put down a rough guess and wait until it’s up on the testing site to ensure the accuracy of the number. This makes sense, but it would seem that even to put in a rough guess a person would need to have some idea what the unit is. Consulting the “Filling out an XML BAD File” on the WIP site doesn’t provide any help in the matter.

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