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A Transcription Puzzle: “then She bore Pale desire”, Part 1

8 May 2014

I am currently in the process of transcribing some of Blake’s manuscript material beginning “then She bore Pale desire” and have run into some difficulty. At the bottom of object 5, Blake adds additional text in a rough hand using pencil. (The majority of the object is covered in brown ink.) I can read the text at the bottom right (which is an addition, the placement of which is indicated by a line). However, there is also what appears to be an abbreviation at the bottom left. I cannot make it out with certainty, and it is not connected to the rest of the text (in any obvious way, at least).

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BAND

Frankenstein’s Proofing Form

30 April 2014

By Margaret Speer In my January 15th 2014 blog post, I mentioned that a goal of mine since relatively early in my time as a Project Assistant to the William Blake Archive (sounds so fancy, doesn’t it?) has been to improve upon the Letters Proofing Form. Side by side with this idea was to maybe even create a generalized proofing form that could be useful for all projects, something to be the Queen Mother Proofing Form. This comment caught the attention of the lovely Laura, and thus the monster was born.

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BAND, XML

To 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.

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BAND, XML

Fontastic 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.

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BAND

Setting Goals in a Group

29 January 2014

The start of a new semester is usually a good time for research groups to take a quick intellectual inventory of the previous months’ accomplishments and to plan ahead for future work. At our first BAND meeting of the spring semester last week, we spent a chunk of time talking about finishing up a new, big batch of letters for publication, as well as looking ahead to see what projects people might move to after the letters are done.

Obviously, from an organizational level, looking ahead is smart in order to prevent any lulls in productivity. But what about personal goals? Student research assistants contribute to ongoing projects, but how can projects contribute to students?

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BAND

The Undergraduate Experience

15 January 2014

By Margaret Speer

As one of the two undergraduate assistants to the Blake Archive at the University of Rochester (BAND), my main activities are:

  • Proofreading letters
  • Asking the graduate students to unlock the door of the Blake Archive office for me
  • Retyping words from Blake’s letters in Word to see if they’re misspelled and therefore require a choice tag
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BAND

Dear Blake: Letters are the Gateway to Digital Editing

20 November 2013

At the Blake Archive, graduate students–and now, undergrads, too–participate deeply in the day-to-day happenings of transcription, encoding, and editing that are typical of digital projects. This fall, the Blake Archive North Division (BAND) welcomed a rather large influx of interested students to the University of Rochester. It presented positive problem for the [distinguished, good looking, still very young, etc.] senior members of the team: what do we do with these newbies?

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