Why we should be talking more: office chat and DH
When I look back over many of the most recent blog posts—Rachel’s about how to use notes with a sense of audience, Oishani’s about Blake’s quirky punctuation, my own about the differences between red wax seals and wafers, and other posts from the past several months—I am not surprised to realize that many of these posts began in the William Blake Archive office as informal conversations about digital editing. I remember Oishani asking my input about how to encode a period under a superscript, and I recall spending the better part of an hour with Laura and Lisa discussing why and how we decide that a letter is sealed by wax or wafer. These conversations are illustrative of one of the greatest benefits of digital humanities projects: the opportunity to collaborate and work with a team of scholars from a variety of backgrounds.
Continue reading
The upcoming volume year is our fiftieth, an anniversary that seems perversely inevitable given Morton Paley’s words in the first issue of 15 June 1967: “I think the Newsletter should be just that—not an incipient journal.” That issue included a report on the rediscovery of the Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook and solicited opinions on the dating of the two Nights the Seventh in The Four Zoas.
