I could have told you that Ruthven Todd was a Blake scholar (here are his credits in early issues of Blake). I could even have told you that he lived in Spain (among other places), conducted printmaking experiments with Joan Miró, and that his papers are now at the University of Leeds. What I didn’t know until today is that he was also a children’s book author.
Continue readingThe Oxford comma is having its moment in the spotlight in recent news, after it was used to clinch a legal case in favor of the five drivers in O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy who, according to the interpretation of policy in the absence of the comma, were therefore found to be eligible for overtime pay. And grammar geeks on the side of the Oxford comma have been rejoicing.
Continue reading“What if God was one of us?” asks singer-songwriter Joan Osborne. It’s actually not that hard to imagine God as a person. Many are familiar with the image of God as the deity appears in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam: an old, imperious man with flowing hair and beard. For many raised in Judeo-Christian traditions, the portrayal of Alanis Morissette as God in the movie Dogma is as far from that image as the imagination strays. Beyond this narrow anthropomorphism, however, lie countless aniconic representations of divinity.
Continue readingMy colleagues have been updating this blog fairly regularly with details of our progress with the marginalia — there’s nothing really much to add there. But with (hopefully) most of the encoding work behind us, there’s still quite a few hurdles ahead, e.g. display. With the Archive being such a collaborative, multi-university effort, we don’t have that much control over the final display of objects, or actually, much knowledge of how this is going to come about.
Continue readingIf you are interested in Blake on Twitter, as I am in my @BlakeQuarterly incarnation, you’ll not go far before you come across interesting posts by Naomi Billingsley (@NAIBillingsley), which I often retweet. I recently asked Naomi if she would participate in a Q&A about her work.
Continue readingAlways interested in the intersections of language and visual representation, in this post I examine the variety of bodies—and range of bodily contortions—encompassed under the single search term “lunging” as a continuation of my series on WBA text tags (see my earlier posts about textual tagging broadly and “streams of gore”).
Continue readingBentley 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.
Continue readingIn 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.
Continue readingThis review will appear in the spring 2017 issue of Blake. The reviewer is Marsha Keith Schuchard, the author of many articles and books on Blake and his circle. To the journal she has contributed “Blake’s Healing Trio: Magnetism, Medicine, and Mania,” “The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society,” and “Young William Blake and the Moravian Tradition of Visionary Art,” as well as an article with Keri Davies, “Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family,” which is referenced below.
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