I’m currently at the end of day 3 of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, where I’m participating in a session on “Issues in Large Project Planning and Management” taught by Lynne Siemens of the University of Victoria School of Public Administration. Lynne has several well-researched articles on DH project management under her belt and is involved with a large interdisciplinary project in Canada (INKE), so she seems like a good person to be learning this from.

Having managed a large DH project myself for the last 5 years (the Blake Archive has 23 staff members, including editors, graduate assistants, and undergraduate work study help), I wasn’t sure whether I was going to learn much in this session. And indeed, the general principles–communication, collaboration, cooperation–are familiar to me; I’ve learned them on the job in this and previous project management/media production positions. Where the course is really helping me, though, is in conceptualizing project management as a step-by-step process: making inventories of necessary skills and required tasks; breaking down workflows into their constituent tasks and assigning those tasks to team members; identifying bottlenecks where the project can’t move forward until certain tasks are completed; and maintaining documentation (a particular weakness of mine). We’re also learning about software tools and templates for project management, including the almighty Gantt chart. When I get back to the Archive next week (just in time for Blake Camp) I’ll begin gradually implementing some of these new skills I’ve learned.

One small quibble with the organization of the event: there are 17 seminars offered at DHSI this year. 15 of these seminars–the ones on GIS, augmented reality, XSLT, databases, and other high-tech subjects–are spread across three main buildings. The remaining two–my seminar on project management and another on the “predigital book”–are taking place in separate buildings (separate from each other and from the main three). So the pattern is: techie people get to hang out together in the main buildings; non-techies are tucked away in isolated corners. The DH community prides itself on its egalitarianism, but sometimes the new meritocracy of techie vs non-techie just replaces the old hierarchy of full prof, assistant prof, grad student.

       The Blake Archive has been preparing an electronic edition of selected letters by William Blake that will be published in installments over the course of the year. This edition, for which I have acted as a project assistant since 2010, has raised several challenges to the technical and editorial practices established in the archive’s earlier editions of Blake’s illuminated books, illustrations, and other visual designs. In a presentation called “Complicated Correspendonce” at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) in Charlottesville, VA this August, I am looking forward to sharing these issues and the diplomatic responses being made to address them at the Blake Archive. I am also fortunate to have the chance to bring some of these questions with me to “Camp Edit,” the Summer Institute for Editing Historical Documents, which I will be attending in the lead-up to the ADE conference.

       Of special interest, to me at least, are those pieces of correspondence that are not directly from Blake’s hand, but are too useful and critically valuable to exclude from an archive dedicated to his work. These documents, included in the standard print editions of Blake’s letters by G.E. Bentley, Geoffrey Keynes, and David V. Erdman, include contemporary letters to or about Blake by his friends, as well as a series of historically important letters from Blake to his sometime friend and patron William Hayley. The latter of these documents are now lost or destroyed, existing only through quotations and transcriptions published in an expanded 1880 edition of the first, posthumous biography of Blake, initially issued in 1863. The composition and publication history of this biography makes matters even less certain, as it was left unfinished at the death of its original author, Alexander Gilchrist. Gilchrist’s death left the completion of the first edition of the biography, and the expansions for the later second edition that include the letters by Blake in question, to a very loosely documented collaboration between multiple contributors and editors, including his widow Anne Gilchrist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and others.

       How, for example, should page 209 of The Life of William Blake (1880), including an unattested transcription of a letter by William Blake to William Hayley of May 4, 1804, be presented in a digital edition?

              How might we distinguish the object by Blake and the surrounding material put there by the editors of his biography?

              How might we best call attention to the uncertain status of the text in our visual presentation, editorial notes, and transcriptions?

              How should we use the mixed digital media of the Blake Archive to do these things?

       These sets of “complicated correspondence” will bring new agents, types of objects, and editorial precedents into the archive, and I hope to post some further updates about the progress of both the typographic and manuscript letters as these move toward publication over the coming weeks and months.

The Blake Archive is going to publish the first 40 years of printed back issues of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (1968-present, so those 40 years take us through 2008), which is now published online on the Open Journal Systems platform. The issues have already been scanned and OCRd, proofed and corrected against the originals, and encoded using TEI Lite. One of the latest things we’ve been trying to figure out in the Blake Archive’s back rooms is what policies should govern our use of published Blake Archive images in the first installment of back issues, which we hope to publish later this year or early next year.

As usual, an apparently simple editorial question turns out to be a mare’s nest that calls for a policy, or policies, plus unpoliced leeway for cases that the policies can’t quite reach (the leeway is in the territory that I call xediting).

The images in the quarterly, as you might imagine, have always been mostly mediocre black-and-white halftones. The Archive’s images are, by comparison, glamorously better–higher resolution, color (and accurate color at that). So it makes sense in publishing the old issues to substitute the Archive’s better images for the quarterly’s old doggy ones. When we can make a one-to-one switch it’s easy.

But what constitutes, say, an approximate equivalent substitution for images that we have, shall we say, versions of but not one-for-one replacements? And can we draw on images that we have stored on the work-in-progress site that the Archive maintains behind the scenes (where we have a huge bank of unpublished images), or do we have to stick to the images we’ve actually published in the Archive?

And when we make substitutions, should we say so? And if we do, how much should we say? Something simple, like “substitution,” or something more specific to the case at hand? And what about correcting mistakes that we inevitably uncover as we work through these illustrations and captions published years and years ago? Should we make the corrections or leave the original error intact in the republished version? Or leave it intact and note the error? Or . . . ? In other words, how faithful should the newly edited online version be to the original?

The best decision we made back when we were first planning to publish the back issues of the quarterly in the Archive was to preserve a PDF of every back issue and to make those PDFs available to all users of the back issues through obvious links. So the original, in all its no-doubt error-riddled glory, will be there for any researcher to consult at any point. That also frees us up to correct the new-made Archive version whenever we feel it’s useful to do so. (I see this as another xediting moment: the decisions we make about when to correct and when not to correct will inevitably be partial and inconsistent–will depend a lot on attention span, available resources, etc., which always play a major–I’d say fundamental–part in editorial activity.) Enough for now. We’ve got to make those decisions and push those back issues out.

The Blake Archive Northern Division (BAND) has expanded! As space is always at a premium on campus, we’re tickled pink to have secured this office space, complete with windows (which actually open), enough space to hold our weekly staff meetings, and an Oriental rug reminiscent of seedy opium dens (just the touch for our meetings, actually).