XML | Hell’s Printing Press

So then what happened?

24 February 2017

Seven months ago I wrote a blog titled “Some Promising Forays into Transcribing Blake’s Marginalia.” Much has changed!

After months of grappling with the logistical and philosophical challenges involved in marginalia transcription, we now have what we think will be the actual marginalia tag-set moving forward (though to be sure, there are a few questions we’re saving for Blake Camp).

As a follow up to the “Promising Forays” I want to provide a brief quasi-narrative description of how we got from point A to point B.

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 22^nd 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.

BAND, XML

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends

10 December 2015

We’ve blogged a few times about our progress with the Four Zoas encoding project, mostly recounting our efforts to develop a more flexible and dynamic schema as well as create an experimental display that takes advantage of our new XML elements. This progress has been slow but steady, and after a rigorous round of development focusing on a single difficult object, we’re ready to test our work across more objects and expand the schema to incorporate more textual features.

So as a theatrical monarch once said, “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Except, I can promise it will be more than just once.

BAND, Blake Camp

Blake Camp 2015

4 November 2015

In the world of the Blake Archive, Blake Camp is one of the highlights of the year. We talk about it as a magical place where tricky problems will be solved and difficult decisions finally made, and even use it to measure time, referring to events as happening “before” or “after” Blake Camp. This year, I was going for the first time.

Digital Humanities, XML

DHSI and the Four Zoas: Part 2

23 October 2015

As I explained in my post last week, I’ve been working on a transcription of Object 13 of The Four Zoas. After my revelation at DHSI, I decided to try encoding two basic transcriptions of the object in order to see how viewing it as an object or as a text changed my results – just as an experiment.

BAND

Four Zoas: Whiteboard Edition

28 January 2015

Behold, a masterpiece of the dry erase medium:

Whiteboard with experimental Four Zoas transcription.

BAND, XML

A Golden Sentence: marginalia and the new tag set

4 December 2014

One of the goals of Team Color Code (sidenote: this is the small group of BAND assistants who are working on The Four Zoas. We’re affectionately known as TCC, which is a name that made sense in our early days and even though it no longer does, it has stuck) is to create a schema that can also be used to tackle transcription and display problems in other works. We’ve always known that the heavily-revised pages of Blake’s Notebook would benefit from an expanded tag set, but I’m starting to come across more and more works that could also use some of the elements that we’re developing in Team Color Code meetings.

BAND, XML

Blake’s Track Changes

6 November 2014

Clarity is elusive—a particularly ironic characteristic of a manuscript that Blake so heavily marked up with instructions on how to read it.

Of course, reading is one thing. Encoding is another.

BAND, XML

OK With Unclear: Transcribing Difficult Texts

8 October 2014

In Rochester, we get a little caught up with transcription practices. It’s not [entirely] our fault. The Blakeians at UNC-Chapel Hill focus on Blake illustrations while the manuscript/language stuff gets sent up north. Blake’s often mystifying script surrounds us, and we have been charged (by God, sure) to transcribe our way out, into the promised land of textual clarity.

During this process, we think unreasonably hard about impossibly small details. Is that a period or a comma? (What is our policy on commas again?) Is that “d” really there? Am I seeing things? Wait, or did I read it?

If you ever wanted to bridge the gap between punctuation and existentialism, textual editing may be for you.

XML

Transparency is Collaboration

17 September 2014

A few of us at the Blake Archive are working on new markup strategies for the infamously difficult Blake manuscript known editorially as Vala, or the Four Zoas. There’s a great (great, great…) deal to be said–and will be said, eventually–about that project specifically, but first a note on some recent collaboration.