Day of DH 2014
8 April 2014
Welcome to BAND’s 2014 Day of DH post where we answer the question, “just what do digital humanists do?”
Continue reading“Just what do digital humanists really do?”: Day of DH
2 April 2014
This coming Tuesday (8 April 2014) Team Blake Archive will be participating in Day of DH, an open community publication project for those interested and working in the digital humanities. The idea is to provide some answers to the question, “Just what do digital humanists really do?” by creating a snapshot of everyday life in the world of DH. Along with many others across the world, we will be documenting our day and posting the results on the blog and here.
Continue readingPublication Announcement – Letters (1800-1805)
31 March 2014
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of our second installment of Blake’s letters, the correspondence of 1800-1805, which includes his three years with patron William Hayley in the coastal village of Felpham, West Sussex, and the frightening months leading up to his trial for sedition.
The letters in this group supplement the Archive’s publication in November 2013 of Blake’s illustrations to works by Hayley, including his Essay on Sculpture, the broadside ballad Little Tom the Sailor,
Continue readingChoice Tags and Attributes in “Blake’s Chaucer”
26 March 2014
A few months ago, Hardeep wrote a blog post about the importance of the XML element <choice> in our manuscript encoding tag set. The main benefit is for the Blake Archive’s search function to allow users to search for regularized spellings of words that might be abbreviated or non-standardized in Blake’s manuscripts. For example, a user searching for “Tiger” would never be directed to “Tyger” without a choice tag attached to Blake’s non-standard spelling.
Last month, I began the transcription and encoding of a typographic work titled Blake’s Chaucer: The Canterbury Pilgrims. The work is a one-page printed advertisement for a [proposed] Blake engraving of Chaucerian characters, “in a correct and finished Line manner of Engraving, similar to those original Copper Plates of ALBERT DURER, LUCAS, HISBEN, ALDEGRAVE.” Of course, the Blake advertisement here is appealing to the fame of some historically relevant engravers, but the manuscript itself only refers to them in abbreviated/non-standard/anglicized forms.
Continue readingFinding Funding: Grant Writing for Undergrads
19 March 2014
By Margaret Speer
Recently, Megan and I (the undergraduate Project Assistants to the Blake Archive at the University of Rochester) applied for Discover Grant funding to support our continued work this coming summer. Without funding, we really won’t be able to participate as much as we do during the fall and spring semesters—possibly not at all.
Continue readingBlake Archive is now on Twitter!
12 March 2014
We’re excited to announce that the William Blake Archive has [finally] arrived on Twitter. You can find and tweet us using @BlakeArchive.
Continue readingTo the Letters
5 March 2014
Since re-grouping in January, the members of BAND have been working earnestly on a variety of new and ongoing projects, including Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue, Receipts, The French Revolution, Chaucer, Prospectus, The Four Zoas, Genesis, Tiriel, and additional groups of Blake’s letters. In an effort to do more shameless plugging for our imminent letters publication, I’d like to share why I decided to continue with the letters project.
Continue readingMaking Lists, Checking Twice
26 February 2014
Soon, the Blake Archive will publish its second batch of Blake’s correspondence, making the bulk of Blake’s ninety or so letters available online. One of the side projects that I’ve been working on has been a Master List of all of Blake’s correspondence. I’m compiling the most recent provenance information about Blake’s letters into a big spreadsheet, which will give us a sense of the future work to be done on Blake’s letters, especially regarding:
Continue readingThe Undergraduate Experience Part II
19 February 2014
By Megan Wilson
Like Margaret, I am an undergraduate at the William Blake Archive with the University of Rochester (BAND). I must commend Margaret on her spot on description of what it is like to work at the Blake Archive.
Continue readingFontastic Mr Blake: tagging A Descriptive Catalogue
12 February 2014
Thanks to the addition of two BAND assistants (hi Megan and Margaret!) to the A Descriptive Catalogue project, we now have a complete (and typo-free!) transcription of the text. The three of us are currently working on marking up the BAD and adding textnotes to the transcription in order to describe the details of the work as completely as possible.
Continue reading