Waves of Regret and Waves of Joy: Searching for the End of the World in the Blake Archive
10 April 2020
Here we are, a month into coronavirus quarantine.
Continue reading
The Blog of the Blake Archive and Blake Quarterly
Tag
Here we are, a month into coronavirus quarantine.
Continue readingThe William Blake Archive recently published seventeen pen and ink drawings by Blake that span the majority of his artistic career. As one of the art historians on staff at the WBA, I was tasked with the responsibility of creating XML documents to accompany each of the works—files that we call Blake Archive Documents or BADs. These BADs are incredibly important as they include not only textual descriptions of the drawings but also tagged search terms, which enable the new drawings to be plugged into the existing search function of the WBA.
Continue readingThe exciting recent publication of Blake’s illustrations of works by William Hayley helps to present a much fuller picture of the period from about 1800-1805 in Blake’s career, which included his conflicted personal and professional associations with Hayley, his only extended sojourn outside of London to a cottage in Felpham, and the episode of his trial for sedition. During this time, Blake’s personal, social, aesthetic, and professional interests intersect through his extensive work for Hayley and in the correspondence though which they planned and discussed these illustrations. At the moment, we are preparing a second installment of letters that will help to augment the resources available within the Archive for exploring this fascinating period in Blake’s life. We are pleased to be able to make these materials available in multiple ways for users, who we hope will benefit from the multiple ways we have prepared for them to search and browse Blake’s works and papers in the Archive.
Continue reading<choice> is the xml element we use to encode alternative spelling in our transcriptions of Blake’s writings. It’s what makes the Blake Archive’s search function forgiving. Say someone searches for all instances of the word “Tiger” in the Blake Archive. A choice tag is what would lead them to instances of the word “Tyger.”
