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This is not a call for reform. This is not an admission of guilt.
Moving deeper into Blake’s typographic works for the Archive has presented a number of new encoding questions, particularly with how to handle potentially “secondary” text on the page, like printer’s marks, catchwords, page numbers, titles, etc.
Continue readingA few months ago, Hardeep wrote a blog post about the importance of the XML element <choice> in our manuscript encoding tag set. The main benefit is for the Blake Archive’s search function to allow users to search for regularized spellings of words that might be abbreviated or non-standardized in Blake’s manuscripts. For example, a user searching for “Tiger” would never be directed to “Tyger” without a choice tag attached to Blake’s non-standard spelling.
Last month, I began the transcription and encoding of a typographic work titled Blake’s Chaucer: The Canterbury Pilgrims. The work is a one-page printed advertisement for a [proposed] Blake engraving of Chaucerian characters, “in a correct and finished Line manner of Engraving, similar to those original Copper Plates of ALBERT DURER, LUCAS, HISBEN, ALDEGRAVE.” Of course, the Blake advertisement here is appealing to the fame of some historically relevant engravers, but the manuscript itself only refers to them in abbreviated/non-standard/anglicized forms.
Continue readingSince 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.
Continue readingThanks 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.
Continue readingThe 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?
Continue readingBy Lisa Vandenbossche
In August I took over a project that Esther Arnold, a recent PhD recipient in the English Department, had started. The project is an illustrated manuscript of the King James translation of the book of Genesis. This manuscript was probably started in the last year of Blake’s life and left unfinished upon his death.
Continue readingAt 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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