The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a fully searchable electronic edition of Blake’s 116 water color illustrations to Thomas Gray’s poems. The Archive first published these designs in April 2005 in our Preview mode. This republication substantially increases the number and range of Blake’s pictorial motifs available for searching on the Archive.
Continue reading
Milton copy D, pl. 36. Library of Congress (image from the Blake Archive).
Blake was full of optimism and sea air when he wrote to John Flaxman after he and Catherine arrived at the cottage in Felpham (though he did remark on the amount of luggage—mostly his stuff, not hers). He immortalized it in Milton pl. 36 and is now immortalized in turn by a blue plaque on the wall. A postcard from the early twentieth century shows the house surrounded by cruciferous vegetables in a scene rather more prosaic than that depicted by Blake.
Continue readingAs Eric discussed last week, a group of us have been working on Vala, or The Four Zoas : a project that has been occupying a large chunk of my emotional and intellectual energy lately. It’s pretty intimidating to tackle a work that is notoriously difficult and the realisation that our early transcription attempts break the way that the Archive currently handles and displays text has been disheartening. However, looking on the bright side, pushing a system to its limits actually helps you to understand it more fully, which not only affects future work but has helped me to think more deeply about past and current projects.
Continue readingA few of us at the Blake Archive are working on new markup strategies for the infamously difficult Blake manuscript known editorially as Vala, or the Four Zoas. There’s a great (great, great…) deal to be said–and will be said, eventually–about that project specifically, but first a note on some recent collaboration.
Continue readingOne of the main ways that we organize Blake Archive works while encoding is through “line groups”, an element represented by <lg> in our BADs (Blake Archive Description). Here’s the formal definition from our documentation:
<lg>. This element identifies line groups–i.e., blocks of text on the object, such as stanzas or paragraphs. For verse, simply use <lg>, but for prose text (i.e., not poetry), use the type with value “prose”: e.g., <lg type=”prose”>.
As BAND has been preparing typographic works for publication, we have encountered a number of new transcription, display and encoding problems related to “secondary text” (discussed most recently by Eric here and Megan here) including one that questions the status of our beloved <lg>. So, riddle me this Ye Transcription Gods, if poetry is <lg> and prose is <lg type=”prose”>, then what is text that is neither poetry nor prose? For example, most of our typographic works include a running header across the top of the page, how should we categorize that?
Continue readingChanges in the weather, conspicuous coffee consumption, two or three return trips to Staples–the advent of a new semester can mean many things. The Great Leveler in academia, of course, is scheduling. We must be many places at many times, and we forever must coordinate ourselves against the variables (and the universe, in general, that conspires against us).
Continue readingThe funny thing about digital projects is that in addition to their online presence, they also exist in the real world. We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year increasing our web-based activity (this blog, twitter, participating in Day of DH and so on) but as we approach the start of the new academic year, I find myself confronting problems that are real, tangible, material. For example, how on earth can I find a time when twelve busy people are all available to meet? And even if that’s possible, where are we going to meet? Is the summer construction around the office going to be finished in time for the new semester? And why is the carpet in our office permanently wrinkled (a question I lose sleep over because I’m worried that someone’s going to trip over and do themselves a horrible injury)?
Continue readingAt the Blake Archive, we strive for god-like workmanship. As such, proofreading for sinful mistakes is an important step in our process. Currently, we have several publications “on-deck” for publishing, but this means that several eyes have to pass over those documents. I am currently proofing a typographical work called Poetical Sketches.
Continue readingContinued from Wednesday’s post, Part 1 Recap of Blake Camp 2014. Also see Morris’s Brief History of Blake Camp.
DAY 2, Friday 14 June
Session 5
E-books, Search Terms, and New Image Sources
We begin with a long discussion of the pros and cons of issuing e-book editions of works in the Archive—focusing perhaps on developing Blake’s most popular and widely studied works in responsive portable formats. Among many other issues discussed are the thorny problems of copyright.
Continue readingBlake Camp 21, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Highlights Part 1
I began with a brief history of Blake Camp—a bit of how-we-live-and-what-we-live-for to explain why it’s such a durable institution, marking the end of one Blake Archive year and the start of the next, BBC to ABC.
This year we met at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the lounge of the English department—on Thursday and Friday, 12-13 June. As always, attendees varied from session to session depending on the subject. They included editors Morris Eaves, Bob Essick, and Joe Viscomi; bibliographer Mark Crosby; project manager Joe Fletcher; our new technical editor Mike Fox; special projects consultant Ashley Reed; and project assistant Adam McCune. Laura Whitebell, the project coordinator at the University of Rochester, attended via Google video chat.
Continue reading