As we continue work on the redesign of the Archive, our collaborative efforts with programmers and web designers who are unfamiliar with Blake’s work reveal aspects of the Archive’s structure and organization that we take for granted. Our bi-weekly meetings often involve volleys of patient explication: the Blake folks (Joe Viscomi, Ashley Reed, Mike Fox, and myself) offer mini lessons on Blake’s multimedia production in order that the designers and programmers better understand the content they’re working with; and they in turn lecture us on the possibilities and constraints involved with the database structures, modified programming languages, etc. that will display that content.

One recent sticking point has been the concept of virtual groups.

Object 32 of The Four Zoas (BB.209) posed a number of curious problems. This was the first experience that Anna, Miles and I had with a Four Zoas object (actually, all Anna and I had tagged before this was a receipt), and so it was quite overwhelming. In this post, I want to focus on the word between “Urizen” and “Power”.

Alan Liu recently gave a talk at UNC-Chapel Hill entitled “Key Trends in Digital Humanities: How the Digital Humanities Challenge the Idea of the Humanities.” It culminated in a discussion of the hermeneutics of the digital humanities. He showed how certain long-standing epistemological modes, such as mimesis and similitude, have exploded into new modes in this new discipline. I want to explore one of those traditional modes, similitude, as it relates to the Blake Archive. At the front end of the Archive, the mode is familiar. At the back end, it becomes unrecognizable and forces one to rethink what it means at the front end.

The following is a note I left to future scholars and editors exploring copy F of Blake’s Songs of Innocence:

“The woman who, in copy B, sits behind the table, second from the left, is nearly absent in copy F. A shape that may be her right shoulder appears in F, as well as in S-IE C and S-IE R. She is absent from S-Inn L and Z.”

“Four Zoas, p. 115–image is not the same as image we have for The Four Zoas. Where to find?” As one of the editorial assistants involved with processing images for the digitizing of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, I faced the occasional challenge of locating an image in the William Blake Archive with the limited information provided by sparse captions of older articles. But what if the image and the caption didn’t match up? I wrote the note above in my BIQ image processing notes, identifying a case where locating the intended image presented an additional challenge to the image hunt.