Andrew Stauffer, associate professor in English at the University of Virginia and Director of NINES, has started a new blog, The Hoarding, to announce and promote new work in nineteenth-century studies ranging from books publications and digital projects to conference announcements. This looks like a great resource for scholars and others interested in nineteenth-century studies.
Continue readingif:book just published the long-anticipated Songs of Imagination and Digitisation, “an illuminated book for the digital age.” On the surface, this digital illuminated book looks (and functions) much like a book: it has covers, a (hyperlinked) table of contents, and turning pages.
This book, however, is also not a book. It does contain text (some of Blake’s short pieces, personal responses to Blake’s work, and new poems and prose by modern writers), but it also uses the book page to frame moving images. Video clips include readings of Blake by Toby Jones and interviews with Chris Meade (the director of if:book), Tim Heath (Chair of the Blake Society), writer Lisa Gee, new media writer Tim Wright, Emma Crewe (director of Child Hope), Sasha Hoare (film maker), and various members of the public. Pages of this digital illuminated book are also linked to other projects and videos — like Lisa Gee’s biography of Blake’s patron, William Hayley; Blake Walks; Blake’s Netbook; and Save the Tyger.
Several commentators mention Blake’s relationship to the new media of his day, and imagine his role within the context of digital media and the internet. Blake’s interest in new forms of media, and new forms of books, make him a perfect figure for this sort of thought-game. Pushing the page to include animated text and moving images naturally extends Blake’s experiments with text and image. The idea of expanding (exploding?) the book to include multimedia elements also reminds me of Zak Nelson’s design for a “new kind of book” (via Web Ink Now).
Nelson’s layout is in response to “a new kind of literacy,” that is, a digital literacy informed by reading websites:
…people are becoming more literate in reading websites, and that neural reconfiguration may well be affecting how traditional books are read and sold (or, unsold as the case may be).
While it’s easy to imagine future books as digital extensions of the codex form, our new digital literacy might in fact more closely resemble ancient practices: reading scrolls. As Lev Manovich observes in The Language of New Media, “scrolling through the contents of a computer window or a World Wide Webpage has more in common with unrolling than it does with turning the pages of a modern book” (75). To me, one of the significant differences between the scrolling of online sources and the turning pages of the book form has to do with our relationship to information, how it is framed and how we can navigate it–whether we access frames of information sequentially, or whether we can scroll hastily to the end for a visual experience with information that is more “all at once.” While obviously bookish, Songs of Imagination and Digitisation does contain a scrolling page; readers’ comments answering the question “Where do you think Blake lives now?”
As a digital illuminated book, Songs of Imagination and Digitisation is an interesting hybrid of book and non-book. It holds on to the borders and sequential linearity of the book–each page contains a single object (either video clip or page of text), and you can only see one page (or set of facing pages) at a time. But it also spreads out into other sites, Blakean projects, and videos. It is is both familiar and strange, and I can’t wait to see what it does next.
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This past weekend, I attended the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, held annually at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum. As in years past, some of my favorite booths are the letterpress vendors, but there are lots of great handmade books, zines, comics, screenprinted posters, and small press books of local history, poetry, and prose. This year, there were also workshops on book binding, screen printing, and zines. Rochester artist, illustrator, and designer Peter Lazarski ran the zine workshop, which included a brief history of zines and an easy tutorial on crafting a small, 8-page booklet. Peter also passed around a copy of Watcha Mean, What’s a Zine? (by Esther Watson and Mark Todd) and I was surprised to see Blake mentioned in “Great Moments in Zine History.”
But of course, it makes perfect sense. Through illuminated printing, a process of relief etching, Blake believed he had solved two major problems in c18 print culture: the separation of text and image, and the difficulty of self-publication. I’ve posted his 1793 prospectus to the public elsewhere, but I’ll repost here. Advertising his new process, Blake writes (emphasis mine):
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated but the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.
If a method of printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.
Self-publishing multi-media work is clearly in line with current DIY crafting aesthetics; MAKE magazine has both a tutorial on illuminated printing and an article on Blake’s self-publishing (thanks to Laura for the link!).
It was certainly possible to print images and text together in c18, but it was difficult to do so. As Joseph Viscomi explains in his essay “Illuminated Printing:”
Technically, such integration was possible in conventional (intaglio) etching… but the economics of publishing had long defined etching as image reproduction and letterpress as text reproduction, so that the conventional illustrated book was the product of much divided labor, with illustrations produced and printed in one medium and shop and separately inserted into leaves printed elsewhere in letterpress on a different kind of press. Even when words and images were brought together on the same leaf, divisions in production were maintained.
Conventional intaglio printmaking involves incising designs into the surface of a copper plate; etching uses acid, and engraving uses sharp, hard tools. (For a great video of intaglio printmaking, check out this video from the Minnesota Institute of Art.) Throughout the c18, many illustrations were engraved reproductions of original works of art, including statuary, paintings, water colors, sketches, and drawings. Engravers developed many techniques to emulate the look of original works; with their tools and techniques, they could imitate wash drawings, chalk lines, light washes of color, and the texture of pencil. (For more about imaging technologies in the c18, see William Ivins’ Print and Visual Communication.) They also developed techniques of line systems, such as cross hatching and dot-and-lozenge, which allow them to imitate a range of tones and lines. You can see below a detail of one of Blake’s commercial engravings showing dot-and-lozenge (from Viscomi’s “Illuminated Printing“).
Detail “Orlando Uprooting a Pine,” engraved by William Blake after Thomas Stothard
Unlike the straight lines of engraving — or the “neat, tidy, characterless and fashionable net of rationality” (as Ivins calls it) — Blake’s process allows a more fluid line, integrated text and image, and ultimately more creative control over the entire process. Instead of cutting straight lines into copper, Blake can draw, write, and paint with pens and brushes.
In practice, Blake wrote texts and drew illustrations with pens and brushes on copper plates in acid-resistant ink and, with nitric acid, etched away the unprotected metal to bring the composite design into printable relief. (Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing“)
Illuminated printing united the work of the poet and the artist by giving him more direct control over the whole process. And despite the fact that Blake could make multiple prints of each plate (thereby creating “exactly repeatable” verbal and visual statements — one of the defining characteristics of print culture), the illuminated books look handcrafted: Blake and his wife Catherine hand-colored many of the images after printing, there is a lot of variation in the color palettes between individual copies of a book, and the poetry — written backwards by Blake onto the plate — resembles handwriting, not standardized typography.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Image from Wikimedia Commons
If you want to see more, go to the Blake Archive, and select any illuminated book. If the Blake Archive has published more than one copy of a work, be sure to hit the “Compare” button beneath the image, and you can see how that page looks in each copy.
Continue readingI have been working as a project assistant on the William Blake Archive (University of Rochester branch) for a year now. Primarily, I’m a copy editor: I’ve been looking closely at the “top pages” of the Archive to make sure they are still up-to-date, convenient to use, and formatted consistently.
When I work on an html page, I compile a set of notes (describing passages that look out of date, inconsistencies in style, etc.), which I then forward to my colleagues at the Rochester division of the Archive for input. Then my revised notes go to the Archive’s list-serve. After the editors respond with their suggestions, I edit the html files (using Nvu) and publish them—first on our testing site and ultimately on our public site.
I inevitably get caught up in minutiae—the most frustrating (but oddly satisfying) of which are the many double-hyphens that need to be replaced with em-dashes. But more comprehensive questions about content, organization, and usability come up regularly (as in the case of our Plan of the Archive and search pages). Our top pages must change as the Archive meets its goals and sets new ones—and as Web technology and the habits of Web users change.
Below is a list of pages that have been revised and of those that are being worked on:
Revisions complete and up on public site:
• Archive at a Glance
• Editorial Principles
• About the Editors
• Contributing Collections
• Standard References and Abbreviations
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Technical Summary
• Articles about the Archive
• The Blake Archive in the Context of CDLA
• Reproductions and Permissions
• User Comments
• Site Information
• Known Hazards and Most Favorable Conditions of the Archive
Research/Revision in progress at Rochester division:
• Plan of the Archive
Notes submitted to list-serve:
• Related Sites
• Search (initial search page)
• Image Search
• Text Search
• Tour of the Archive
Michael Phillips will be curating the first retrospective of Blake’s work in France at the Petit Palais April 2 – June 28, 2009. View the press release here.
Continue readingThe William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Milton a Poem Copy B. There are only four copies of Milton, Blake’s most personal epic. Copy B, from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, joins Copy A, from the British Museum, and Copy C, from the New York Public Library, previously published in the Archive. Blake etched forty-five plates for Milton in relief, with some full-page designs in white-line etching, between c. 1804 (the date on the title page) and c. 1810. Six additional plates (a-f) were probably etched in subsequent years up to 1818. No copy contains all fifty-one plates. The prose “Preface” (plate 2) appears only in Copies A and B. Plates a-e appear only in Copies C and D, plate f only in Copy D. The first printing, late in 1810 or early in 1811, produced Copies A-C, printed in black ink and finished in water colors. Blake retained Copy C and added new plates and rearranged others at least twice; Copy C was not finished until c. 1821. Copy D was printed in 1818 in orange ink and elaborately colored. The Archive will publish an electronic edition of Copy D in the near future. Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Milton Copy B are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated books. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to all copies of Milton in the Archive. With the publication of Milton Copy B, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of sixty-eight copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, sketches, and water color drawings, including Blake’s illustrations to Thomas Gray’s Poems, water color and engraved illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the large color printed drawings of 1795 and c. 1805, the Linnell and Butts sets of the Book of Job water colors and the sketchbook containing drawings for the engraved illustrations to the Book of Job, the water color illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave, and all nine of Blake’s water color series illustrating the poetry of John Milton. As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager
William Shaw, technical editor
Continue readingBlake/An Illustrated Quarterly (sometimes known as the Blake Quarterly, BIQ, or just Blake) is an academic journal that was founded in the late 1960s by Morton Paley at UC Berkeley; in the years since, its production offices (actually office) have moved first to the University of New Mexico and then to its present home at the University of Rochester with the other editor, Morris Eaves, who is also co-editor of the Blake Archive.
We are currently print only, but are negotiating the journey from hard copy to an electronic existence. Our first task is to digitize our back issues, currently cloistered in a windowless storeroom but before long hopefully available on the web. After that we’ll turn our attention to getting new issues online.
Along with chronicling this transition, I’ll post about Blake-related events that come to our attention. This year, the Tate is planning to display works from Blake’s one-man exhibition of 1809, and from April to June there will be a major exhibition in Paris.
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Thomas Chatterton. Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. London: T. Payne and Son, 1778.
Via the “Book of the Month” feature of the Rare Books Library at the University of Rochester. Curator Pablo Alvarez’s description of this volume (and more pictures!) can be found here.
Thomas Chatterton: genius, forger, suicide, and Romantic hero. Chatterton created the 15th century priest and poet, Thomas Rowley, forged manuscripts of poetry, and published them as real historical finds (complete with marginal glosses and explanatory footnotes). The image above depicts an engraving of one of Chatterton’s forged manuscript pages. As Alvarez describes, his hoax was well researched:
Chatterton examined medieval manuscripts not only from St. Mary Redcliff Church but also from local libraries and bookstores in order to create a fifteenth-century hand. He consulted medieval glossaries and etymological dictionaries to fabricate what he erroneously thought was a version of fifteenth-century English—his medieval vocabulary included some 1,800 words. More dramatically, he did not hesitate to manufacture manuscripts that looked old by rubbing the parchment with dirt or dying it with tea. If he didn’t produce a manuscript, he simply claimed that the poems in question had been copied from an original version that existed elsewhere (Grafton, 1990: 50-3; Rosenblum, 2000: 57-105).
Chatterton died at the age of 17 by arsenic, an apparent suicide (although Nick Groom argues that his death may have been accidental, as arsenic was used to treat sexually transmitted diseases). His poetic genius and tragic death made him a Romantic hero; the “marvellous Boy,” as William Wordsworth calls him in “Resolution and Independence,” was commemorated in works by Percy Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton. 1856.
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Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. London: Collins & Brown, 1990.
Rosenblum, Joseph. Practice to Deceive: The Amazing Stories of Literary Forgery’s Most Notorious Practitioners. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000.
Continue readingA research project of the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, the Electronic Enlightenment invites you to “explore the original web of correspondence: read letters between the founders of the modern world and their friends and families, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers.” While EE clearly defines itself as a digital project, “a ‘living‘ interlinked collection of letters and correspondents” (FAQ), its foundation is made of paper; that is, the primary source of its content (at this point) have been the print editions of academic presses.
From “Principles of the Edition:”
To date, most of the content of EE has been provided by printed editions of correspondences from academic presses worldwide; nevertheless, it should not be viewed simply as an aggregation of these editions. Rather it is a database of individual letters and correspondents that can be searched or browsed as a complete collection.
From the “Introduction:”
EE has as its foundation major printed editions of correspondence centred on the “long 18th century”. From the correspondence itself, the supporting critical apparatus and additional research carried out by EE, we have developed a set of information categories, from dates and names to textual variants — indeed, any piece of information that contributes to our understanding of the documents. The data captured within these information categories enriches EE as a digital academic resource, by creating an intricate network of connections between the documents.
EE provides access to over 53,000 letters and documents from several centuries (the earliest letter is from 1619), correspondent bi0graphies, and explanatory notes (depending on the source edition, these might be editorial, textual, linguistic, or general notes). The searching capabilities appear extensive; users can search for letters by content (words or phrases), author name, place of origin, date (including day, month, and year), recipient, and the city or country where it was received.
Moving beyond its bookish roots, EE openly invites user collaboration. Users can supply missing information about biographies, dating of documents, locating correspondents, and translations. Readers can submit new letters for electronic publication. Scholars can even develop their own born-digital projects. From “Contributor Services:”
EE will provide a creative space for scholars to develop new born-digital critical editions of correspondences online. It will offer a central area where progress reports can be posted or linked, discussion lists for collaborators and testers maintained, and project results published. When prepared, these editions can be integrated seamlessly into the full collection of EE.
EE offers born-digital editions the possibility of publishing correspondence collections online, integrated into our network of biographical and documentary links.
Despite all of this exciting, collaborative coolness, however, access to the project seems to be by institutional subscription only. (Even the “free trial” available through Oxford University Press seems to be tied to institutional affiliation.)
Continue readingLisa Spiro at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities started her review of the digital humanities in 2008. She starts with the “Emergence of the Digital Humanities,” and considers NEH’s establishment of the Office of the Digital Humanities as “giving credibility to an emerging field (discipline? methodology?).” The next section is (fittingly) “Defining ‘Digital Humanities,'” where Spiro traces critical key definitions of the “Digital Humanities,” such as discussions of whether it is a method, field, or medium. The last section of this first part of her review is “Community and Collaboration,” which surveys virtual networks of scholars, Humanities Research Centers, and Twitter as “a vehicle for scholarly conversation.”
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