As I explained in my post last week, I’ve been working on a transcription of Object 13 of The Four Zoas. After my revelation at DHSI, I decided to try encoding two basic transcriptions of the object in order to see how viewing it as an object or as a text changed my results – just as an experiment.
Continue readingIn June, I went to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in Victoria, BC. I have a whole other post in my head about the ferry journey from Seattle to Victoria (beautiful!), the fish tacones at Red Fish Blue Fish (delicious!) and the nineteenth-century architecture of the city (magnificent!), but for now I’ll stick to the subject at hand: encoding the Four Zoas.
Continue readingA few months ago, I wrote a post that introduced the idea of experimenting with the Archive’s cache of high-resolution digital photography in Photoshop. Experimentation has continued and has provided some interesting results. It’s difficult to label the experiments as successes or failures—the stakes aren’t that high yet. But in the DH/Zen-like spirit of play and working-without-aiming, let’s continue with the fun.
Continue readingThe William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of There is No Natural Religion Copies A, D, and M, from the British Museum, Houghton Library, and Victoria and Albert Museum respectively. They join Copy B, from Yale Center for British Art, Copy C, from the Library of Congress, and Copies G1-2 and L, from the Morgan Library and Museum. The Archive now has all seven extant copies of this illuminated book, making There is No Natural Religion the sixth illuminated book with its entire publishing history reproduced in the Archive, joining The Song of Los, Milton a Poem, All Religions are One, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los. The Archive will add
Continue readingThe William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a fully searchable electronic edition of Blake’s water color illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Archive first published these in January 2005 in our Preview mode. This republication substantially increases the number and range of Blake’s pictorial motifs available for searching on the Archive. The 7 engravings illustrating Dante’s poem continue to be available in the Archive in Preview mode.
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The Blake Quarterly published its spring issue recently. It includes our annual “Blake in the Marketplace” feature by Robert N. Essick (who’s also one of the editors of the Blake Archive). “Marketplace” is always hefty on details but light in tone; there are lots of illustrations and the illustration captions, often in the form of mini-essays, are legendary. Elsewhere in the issue, Paul Miner explores Blake’s attitude to royalty (George III, Charlotte, and Marie Antoinette) and Jeff Mertz reviews Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies, written at the end of his life and brought to fruition by his former student Joseph Viscomi. Lastly, Joseph Wittreich uses two recently published books about William Hayley (one a collection of essays and the other a selection of his poetry) to discuss not only Hayley but also the reception history of Milton.
The Blake Quarterly site is www.blakequarterly.org.
Continue readingWork that happens in a linear fashion is, generally, very boring. Our work on Blake’s typographical piece Poetical Sketches has certainly avoided that problem.
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Sometimes we hear of worthy projects for which funds are being raised, such as the Blake Society’s initiative to purchase Blake’s cottage in Felpham. Another, on a slightly smaller scale, came to our attention recently. The following is excerpted from the original message:
My name is Gaelen Armstrong – I’m a Canadian metal artist currently residing in the US. My collaborator and I are admirers of William Blake, and we’re designing a project for reproducing Blake’s Ancient of Days as large copper bas reliefs.
Our Ancient of Days will be roughly 2′ x 4′ (x 3.5″, at its greatest depth), and will be pure copper. We’ll finish them with our handmade patinas and a variety of gold, silver, and brass brushplating. Each piece will be unique and substantial. We’ve made over 150 pieces of copper art together, and we’re excited to take on Blake’s masterpiece.
We’ve created a Kickstarter campaign to cover the last few materials needed to bring the project to fruition. Though there are a variety of rewards for smaller pledges, those who pledge $1500 or more will receive their own 2′ x 4′ relief of the Ancient of Days.
As a side note, pledges on Kickstarter are noted but no funds change hands unless the project meets its funding goal by the campaign’s deadline. (So there’s no risk of supporting a project that only gets partial funding, and therefore remains unfulfilled.)
The link for the campaign is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/350052336/william-blakes-ancient-of-days-in-copper-silver-an. It runs until 8 May 2015.
Continue readingWe’ve blogged quite a bit about our recent work creating an experimental edition of The Four Zoas. That sort of work has been on the encoding/display end of things. And while that work is ongoing, I’ve since become occupied with digital imaging and the potential editorial/archival uses for digital software, like Adobe Photoshop.
When I first sat down to a computer with some of these questions in mind, it took about five minutes to realize I needed full, lossless, high-resolution files to see anything in meaningful detail. I was able to work out a few techniques for recovering faded text (which I will blog about in the future), but some immediate questions our Rochester group had involved compressed files vs. high-resolution. So, dear reader, if you’ll permit me, today I’m going to respond to the group in blog form with some quick explanations and comparative screenshots.
Continue readingWe’re approaching the end of semester here, and, as you all know, “summer vacation” in the wonderful world of academia doesn’t mean time off but time to actually try and get work done. Accordingly, over the last few weeks, I’ve been putting my ducks in a row and trying to organize my projects for the summer. The task at the top of my list is to update our transcription guidelines and tag set, and (hopefully) to put them into some sort of format that we can eventually make public for users of the Blake Archive. This project isn’t as snoozeworthy as it sounds: I’m actually looking forward to incorporating the transcription decisions that we’ve made over the last few years and seeing what kind of editorial rationale emerges (assuming, of course, that there has been some method to our madness).
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