2018 marks the 100 year anniversary of the ending of WWI, (that is if you do not factor in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919) and just so happens to coincide with a graduate seminar I am currently enrolled in called  “The Great War and Modern Memory.” This class has curiously overlapped in subtle ways with my time spent pondering Blake in the Archive. Blake, of course, did not fight in WWI, but in a strange mixture of past and present, similar to this blog post, he inspired many of the WWI poets and even artists who lived through the Great War and who drew upon his poetry and art in inspiring their own.  

One of the more significant items on my busy schedule this semester is teaching Introduction to Digital Media Studies here at UR. It’s a class I very much enjoy teaching, and one for which I also very much enjoyed designing the syllabus.

Intended as a survey of all things DMS, the class cruises through a wide variety of ideas, tech, people, and histories. Given my close association with the Blake Archive for the last 4.5 years (really?!), I couldn’t help but sneak some BA in there. 

A while back (actually it’s been more than a year) I wrote about our efforts to develop a set of shared terms to be used across the Four Zoas and Marginalia projects. We’ve been struggling with this since, with the use of <layer> in the marginalia encoding as an interim solution. Since the Four Zoas project has unusual (ahem) layout and intensive revisions, we introduced <zone> to represent the spatial structure of the text and <stage> as a child element of line in an attempt to represent every act of editing in detail. For the marginalia however, we needed a tag to distinguish between Blake’s writing and the typographic text more than anything to denote layers of revision and editing within the line. In order to avoid confusion, we decided to use <layer> for our schema. The results looked like this: