Two additional events in conjunction with the Blake exhibit at the Morgan Library & Musuem:

Thursday, October 8 at 6:30 p.m.
“Blake’s Enlightened Graphics: Illuminated Books and New Technologies,” Joseph Viscomi

Thursday, November 19 at 7:30 p.m.
“Blake in Poetry and Song: An Evening with Patti Smith.” Patti Smith and her daughter will do an evening of poetry and music inspired by Blake.

A bit on Blake in the NY Times here.

John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will be visiting the University of Rochester next Wednesday and Thursday, September 16 and 17. Unsworth will be heading a workshop on “Big Data” in the Humanities, as well as speaking about Google Books and current issues and controversies surrounding digital publishing and copyright. More information is forthcoming! The workshop is scheduled for 1-3 pm on Sept. 16th (Hawkins-Carlson Room), and the lecture is 4:30-6 on Sept. 17th (Welles/Brown Room).

Unsworth founded Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic Humanities journal (now published within Project Muse). He also organized and chaired the TEI Consortium. Many of Unsworth’s writings are available from his CV.

Blake Press Release

From the website:

William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun”
September 11, 2009, through January 3, 2010

+Zoom William Blake (1757–1827) Behemoth and Leviathan, ca. 1805–10 [Book of Job, no. 15] Pen and black and gray ink, gray wash, and watercolor, over faint indications in pencil, on paper 10 1/16 x 7 3/4 inches (272 x 197 mm) Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1903; 2001.77

Visionary and nonconformist William Blake (1757–1827) is a singular figure in the history of Western art and literature: a poet, painter, and printmaker. Ambitiously creative, Blake had an abiding interest in theology and philosophy, which, during the age of revolution, inspired thoroughly original and personal investigations into the state of man and his soul. In his lifetime Blake was best known as an engraver; he was later recognized for his innovations across many other disciplines.

In the Morgan’s first exhibition devoted to Blake in two decades, former director Charles Ryskamp and curators Anna Lou Ashby and Cara Denison have assembled many of Blake’s most spectacular watercolors, prints, and illuminated books of poetry to dramatically underscore his genius and enduring influence. William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun”—the subtitle a quote from Blake referring to the significance of his date of birth—is on view from September 11, 2009, to January 3, 2010.

The show includes more than 100 works and among the many highlights are two major series of watercolors, rarely displayed in their entirety. The twenty-one watercolors for Blake’s seminal illustrations for the Book of Job—considered one of his greatest works and revealing his personal engagement with biblical texts—were created about 1805–10. Also on view are twelve drawings illustrating John Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, executed about 1816–20. Both series were undertaken for Blake’s principal patron, Thomas Butts.

In addition to the superlative watercolor series—twenty-one illustrations to the Book of Job and twelve designs illustrating Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso—other important drawings are on display, including Fire (ca. 1805), which addresses the subject of war. The more fully expressed Continental Prophecies, a series of three illuminated books, further showcase Blake’s talents as a visual artist and his passionate interest in politics.

Blake’s fame as a poet is seen in his fair copy of ballads known as The Pickering Manuscript, named after its early owner and publisher. Giving voice to Blake’s well-known poem “Auguries of Innocence,” found in the manuscript, is the actor Jeremy Irons, who has also recorded the shorter poem, “Tyger.” These can be heard on a gallery listening station and on the Morgan’s Web site.

Blake supported himself with his engravings, and a selection of his prints—many of which are extremely rare impressions—documents this important aspect of his production. A magnificent example of Blake’s largest print, touched with watercolor by the artist, depicts Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. With this work the artist hoped for commercial success, something he was unable to secure in his lifetime.

Among Blake’s crowning achievements as a visual artist and poet are his illuminated books, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (ca. 1794). These works, which also showcase his exceptional technical skills, reflect medieval manuscript illumination and the interrelationship between word and image. Also on view is the only dated copy of Blake’s dramatic The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Shedding light on the artistic milieu surrounding Blake are a number of works by friends and contemporaries, including drawings by younger artists such as John Linnell (1792–1882) and members of a group that assembled around Blake and called themselves the Ancients. Also represented are works by painters such as Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) and Henry Fuseli (1741–1825).

This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Fay and Geoffrey Elliott.

The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture (an ASECS affiliate) has just launched Enfilade.  Though a serial newsletter primarily intended for HECAA members,  Enfilade includes CFPs for architecture and visual culture, exhibition announcements, art auction notes, fellowship information, and “the 18th century in the news.”

Like the appropriately named The Hoarding, a blog “devoted to reporting recent work in British Romantic and Victorian literature,” Enfilade takes its name from an eighteenth-century architectural feature. From The Hoarding‘s about page:

According to the OED, a hoarding is a nineteenth-century term for “a temporary fence made of boards inclosing a building while in course of erection or repair; often used for posting bills and advertisements; hence, any boarding on which bills are posted.”

James Orlando Parry, “A London Street Scene” (1835)

Where a Victorian “hoarding” seems a layered, visually chaotic space, the “enfilade” emphasizes the linearity of organized space. From Enfilade‘s A Note on the Name:

Enfilade is intended to encapsulate the sense in which various entries are threaded together along a central axis (in this case the order of the postings).Throughout the eighteenth century — in the realm of the ideal plan as well as often enough in life itself — the enfilade served to organize space and vision.

Jacques-François Blondel, Château de Vendeuvre (Normandy), 1750s. Wikimedia Commons.

As many panel sessions for the 2010 ASECS conference can attest, there is remarkable interest in the intersections between eighteenth-century culture and digital technologies. Panel sessions range from new understandings of epistolary novels through the lens of blogging, miscroblogging, and email; critical responses to (and solutions for) databases of eighteenth-century texts; and digital tools and strategies for teaching the eighteenth-century. Yet another correspondence seems to be repurposing provocative terms for historical spaces to describe the “new” digital spaces of academic blogging.

From the institute announcement:

Announcing: FIDLH 2009: The Second Annual Fall Institute in Digital Libraries and Humanities.

FIDLH 2008 was held at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NM, September 25th, 26th, and 27th thanks to the support of the Electronic Text Centre at UNB libraries, the Digital Culture Observatory at Acadia University, and the University of New Brunswick and Acadia University.

More than 30 librarians, library staff, humanists, and students attended FIDLH 2008, and all reported a very positive and collegial learning experience. FIDLH 2009 will be held at Acadia University, in Wolfville, NS, September 24th, 25th, and 26th. This year, as last, the cost will be $300.00 per employed participant and $100.00 per student. Acadia’s Office of Graduate Studies and Research has offered to help defer the cost of student participation, so depending on the number of students who register student costs will be slightly or significantly less than the $100.00 posted rate. One day participation will also be available at a rate of $100.00.

Each of the three days will begin with a plenary talk on a topic of interest to those in attendance, followed by a morning and an afternoon workshop in which participants will choose from among the following offerings: using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) for electronic journal management, XML encoding for journal articles, Data Conversation and Digital Imaging, Tools for Text Analysis, Concepts in Text Analysis, Designing and Implementing Usability Tests, and Using Computer Games in Teaching.

Participants should plan to bring their own laptop or netbook computer. A limited number of laptops will be available to rent.

Registration for FIDLH 2009 will open July 24, and is accessible through our website.

We look forward to seeing you this fall in the beautiful Annapolis Valley.

Richard Cunningham, Associate Professor
English and Theatre
Director, ADCO
Acadia University
Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6

Erik Moore
Director of the ETC
UNB Libraries
Fredericton, NB E3B 5H5

Salon.com recently published an excerpt from Scott Rosenberg’s new book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters (Crown Publishing 2009).  The book chronicles the rise and continuing evolution of blogging, along with its effects on social interactions, business, politics, and all other areas of culture and society. Especially interesting is Rosenberg’s claim that “We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone.” While the Internet and computing technology in general draws much from TV with regard to interface, the telephone, with its focus on communication and shared information, is just as useful to think about as a major predecessor.

Big-media efforts to use the Net for the delivery of old-fashioned one-way products have regularly failed or underperformed. Social uses of our time online — email, instant messaging and chat, blogging, Facebook-style networking — far outstrip time spent in passive consumption of commercial media. In other words, businesspeople have consistently overestimated the Web’s similarities to television and underestimated its kinship to the telephone.

Rosenberg also notes that the same anxieties that surrounded the telephone in its early years are now being resuscitated to fit the Web:

When the telephone arrived in American homes and businesses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was some uncertainty over how people would use it and how using it would change their lives. Some social critics worried that the telephone’s insistent intrusions would undermine the status of the home as a refuge from the world’s pressures. Others feared that the phone would erode the shared public space of our communities and disengage us from social life. Telephone conversations were neither private nor trusted. Party lines and operators meant conversations were likely to be overheard; con artists took advantage of the new technology to prey on the naive.

The Web is still a new technology, and its complexity, breadth, and ubiquity have raised some important questions about security, as well as about its social, political, and economic effects. The participatory nature of the Web is one of many areas where both critics and proponents of activities like blogging have had a lot to say. The consensus on both sides, however, is that blogs could change, and in part have already changed, the way we read, the way we interact, and, ultimately, the way we think.

One reason for this is that blogs, as Rosenberg notes, manage to successfully incorporate the interactive, two-way communication model of the telephone while also relying on some of the visual and spectacular elements familiar in television. On the book’s official website, Rosenberg notes that

Before blogs, it was easy to believe that the Web would grow up to be a clickable TV — slick, passive, mass-market. Instead, blogging brought the Web’s native character into focus — convivial, expressive, democratic. Far from being pajama-clad loners, bloggers have become the curators of our collective experience, testing out their ideas in front of a crowd and linking people in ways that broadcasts can’t match.

The end result of this is that

we can now see that collectively [blogs] constitute something unprecedented in human history: a new kind of public sphere, at once ephemeral and timeless, sharing the characteristics of conversation and deliberation. Blogging allows us to think out loud together. Now that we have begun, it’s impossible to imagine stopping.

Rosenberg has also taken advantage of the interactivity made possible by the Web in another way: by compiling and hyperlinking the book’s endnotes on the official website for your perusal.

Rosenberg has his own blog at wordyard.com.

If you haven’t already, check out the wonderful digital publication of the Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian bible dating from the fourth century. Its online incarnation includes an incredibly detailed scholarly apparatus divided into five primary activities:

• historical research
• conservation
• digitisation
• transcription
• dissemination

The process of translating the physical properties of the manuscript into digital display is documented not only through imaging standards and transcription policies, but also with a really interesting account of conservation analysis, nicely supplemented with photographs and charts. The interface is also really cool; when looking at manuscript pages, users can control what exactly gets displayed. Display options include image, translation, transcription, and physical description, and the interface changes depending on the options selected.

We just found out about an independent film based on Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

From the press release:

FLASHGUN FILMS, announce the release of Blake’s Striptease, which represents an artistic interpretation of William Blake’s poem: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793). Arguably Blake’s most influential work, the poem has fascinated academics and theologians alike. Set within contemporary society the film uses the context of lap-dancing to show that sin is more than simply an issue of right wrong—good and evil—and is a necessary part of human existence. The film has been submitted to film festivals internationally for screening in the fall.

Set to music by the pianist Erik Satie, the film features a voice-over by Sue Hansen-Styles (used in the Hitman Trilogy) reading a selection of lines from the poem. In line with the poem, the film depicts mans birth into the world as John Symes, lead actor, lies underwater in his bath preparing for his stag night. As the story unfolds John is met by an angel who warns him about his propinquity to sin. John soon meets with his two friends (the peacock and the goat) in a public house where they become intoxicated. During his journey John is revisited by the angel and warned again – but he ignores this advice and the men end up in a lap dancing club guarded by doormen (who play the lions). Here the men observe a striptease where upon the lustful goat attempts to accost the lap-dancer and is ejected by the doormen. Meanwhile John slips away to the VIP room where two tyger lap-dancers lie in wait and he commits the mortal sin of lust – an act that proves to be his undoing. The film concludes with John undergoing a terrifying physical transformation and a quote summarising Blake’s work.

Flashgun Films are an innovative association of indie film-makers and actors that specialise in music videos, commercials and short films. Thier previous entry to Portobello Film Festival—King Lear of the Taxi—was short-listed for “Best Director” and featured a voice-over from poet, actor and NYC Cab Driver Davidson Garrett. Portobello now stands as the biggest film festival in Europe.