Tag

Blake Letters

BAND, Uncategorized

Working with Vertical Text

13 April 2016

It wasn’t until I began looking through all the letters in the Blake Archive that I realized just how unique Blake’s second November 22nd 1802 letter to Thomas Butts really is. This uniqueness poses some interesting problems when it comes to encoding. The text of this letter fills both leaves of paper from top to bottom and comes very close to the margins. It includes both prose and verse, and the verse is in two columns that begin on the first page and end on the second.

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BAND, Digital Humanities

Stopping to smell the roses: more thoughts on DH and collaboration

25 March 2015

We have been fortunate to have a series of visiting Digital Humanities scholars at the University of Rochester over the last few months, and while all of their projects and approaches have been very different, most have still emphasized the importance of collaboration in their work. We’ve written a post about the topic before, but this time I want to focus more generally on the different kinds of group work we engage in at BAND.

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Uncategorized

Tracking Down Letters

22 October 2014

I’ve written before about my ongoing project of compiling a “master list” of the present locations for all of Blake’s correspondence. To collect all of this data, I’ve scoured a tall stack of fat books and a lot of online catalogues. The baseline for this list is the work info that we’ve already verified on the Blake Archive: both for letters that we’ve published and for those that are on deck for publication. Locating the rest of the letters has taken (and is still taking) some hunting around.

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BAND

Transcribe what you…read?

24 September 2014

As Eric discussed last week, a group of us have been working on Vala, or The Four Zoas : a project that has been occupying a large chunk of my emotional and intellectual energy lately. It’s pretty intimidating to tackle a work that is notoriously difficult and the realisation that our early transcription attempts break the way that the Archive currently handles and displays text has been disheartening. However, looking on the bright side, pushing a system to its limits actually helps you to understand it more fully, which not only affects future work but has helped me to think more deeply about past and current projects.

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BAND, XML

Toe the Line: Defining (Part 1)

10 September 2014

One of the main ways that we organize Blake Archive works while encoding is through “line groups”, an element represented by <lg> in our BADs (Blake Archive Description). Here’s the formal definition from our documentation:

<lg>. This element identifies line groups–i.e., blocks of text on the object, such as stanzas or paragraphs. For verse, simply use <lg>, but for prose text (i.e., not poetry), use the type with value “prose”: e.g., <lg type=”prose”>.

As BAND has been preparing typographic works for publication, we have encountered a number of new transcription, display and encoding problems related to “secondary text” (discussed most recently by Eric here and Megan here) including one that questions the status of our beloved <lg>. So, riddle me this Ye Transcription Gods, if poetry is <lg> and prose  is <lg type=”prose”>, then what is text that is neither poetry nor prose? For example, most of our typographic works include a running header across the top of the page, how should we categorize that?

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BAND

Lost Letters

30 July 2014

A few months back, I wrote a post about compiling a master list of all of Blake’s letters. The goal is to have an up-to-date bibliography of every letter that Blake ever wrote or received, along with letters by Blake’s contemporaries that have to do with him in some way.

As I’ve been putting this list together, I’ve come across a number of letters that pose a substantial obstacle to publishing them. Not only have these letters never been published before, they have never even been traced.

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BAND

Making 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:

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