Appeal from scholar working on E. D. Hirsch
12 September 2018
I am working on a book on E. D. Hirsch, who made some controversial contributions to Blake studies in the 1960s.
Continue readingQ&A with Roger Whitson
6 September 2018
Our latest Q&A is with Roger Whitson (@RogerWhitson), on Blake, steampunk, technology, media, and mindfulness.
Continue readingPublication: Blake’s Notebook
29 August 2018
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a digital edition of Blake’s Notebook, based on fresh digital photography from the British Library and presented in Preview mode—with enlargements and basic bibliographical information but without transcriptions. Usually works in Preview mode lack illustration descriptions as well, but in this case the minutely detailed descriptions for each illustration in the Notebook are available and fully searchable.
Continue readingBlake Quarterly summer 2018
24 July 2018
Summer is our checklist issue, and our contributors this year are Luisa Calè for exhibitions, Wayne (Chuck) Ripley for criticism (with the assistance of Hikari Sato and Fernando Castanedo), and Jason Whittaker for music. As Chuck writes in his introduction, which contains an overview of the Blake checklist tradition,
Continue readingThe Diffusion of Blake Letters
20 July 2018
The Blake Archive Northern Division has been hard at work transcribing and proofing the next installment of Blake letters for eventual publication, hopefully within the next year. There are currently 53 letters in the Blake Archive, and this next batch will contain another 28. These two batches comprise all of the Blake letters for which we have the images in our possession. This naturally raises the question, what other letters are out there for which we might be interested in obtaining images? I recently spent some time investigating the matter to figure out how many other Blake letters there are and where those letters are located.
Continue readingPublication: URIZEN Copy J
28 June 2018
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a digital edition of Blake’s The First Book of Urizen Copy J. This copy was acquired at an unknown time, probably in the nineteenth century, by the Royal Library, Vienna, and transferred in 1903 to the Albertina Museum, Vienna. However, it was not known to students of Blake until near the end of the twentieth century when the German Blake scholar and art historian Detlef Dörrbecker rediscovered it. This is the first time Copy J has been edited and reproduced in true-size, high-resolution images.
Continue readingFrom William Seward to William Blake—and Back Again: Lessons Learned from the William Blake Archive
3 May 2018
As part of my duties as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities, I am required to serve as a Research Assistant for one of the many digital humanities projects at the University of Rochester. I was drawn to the William Blake Archive for several reasons. First, the Archive is a foundational DH project. Its depth and multi-institutional workflow serve as a model for onlookers hoping to recreate a successful digital collaboration. Selfishly though, I was also drawn to the William Blake Archive with an intent to gain more experience in XML, TEI, and digital-documentary editing. I hoped to adapt elements of the William Blake Archive for a more recent digital project ongoing at the University of Rochester, the Seward Family Digital Archive.
Continue readingPublication: A DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE
30 April 2018
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions, Painted by William Blake, in Water Colours, Being the Ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored: and [water color] Drawings, For Public Inspection, and for Sale by Private Contract. Printed by a job printer in a small run, perhaps fewer than one hundred copies, the catalogue accompanied his self-organized one-man exhibition of 1809-10. It hung in the rooms above his brother’s haberdashery shop in Soho—Blake’s childhood home. The price of the catalogue included admission to the exhibition.
Tutorial Video: Introduction to Search
29 April 2018
Did you know that the search function of the William Blake Archive is one of the most helpful features of the site, allowing you to search both text and image content?
With our search function, you can plug in search terms that lead you not only to poetry and prose, but to images that illustrate the ideas or content that interest you.
Continue readingBlake Quarterly spring issue
24 April 2018
Our spring issue, with another bumper crop of contributions, is out this week and, even better, open access for the next few days.
Continue reading