![]() And literary scholars were busy creating commentaries and basic tools like bibliographies, and also catalogs of their own and editions of Blake’s texts.īut the twain seldom met, and the limitations of print were really serious because you simply couldn’t reproduce enough of Blake’s work to give anybody more than just a hint of what it all amounted to in the end. How did scholars handle Blake before digitization?Īrt historians were fairly busy with Blake over the last 100 years, creating catalogs and a few books. And those disciplines have different ways of dealing with their subjects. And the old problem, in this case, was that Blake’s work was hard to know fully because it was so dispersed across collections around the world and because it was directed into two basic channels: English departments and art and art history departments. ![]() Like many of the early projects in the digital humanities, we weren’t thinking up new problems-we were creating what we thought could be new solutions to old problems. We just blindly walked down this path because we thought Blake needed it-he needed this kind of synthesized place where people could see the full range of his work. We had no idea what the future of the project was. Our first years of planning began in 1993 and coincided with the first years of the World Wide Web as we know it. In the digital humanities, things change so fast. That sharply differentiates work in the digital humanities from work in the traditional humanities, where what you’re going to do is write a book, or publish in a journal, or publish a collection. There’s a fundamental problem in the digital humanities, which we’ve known about from the beginning: what eventually will happen to whatever project you undertake is almost entirely unknown. How has the archive helped to set a standard for digital humanities? His team carries out transcriptions that eventually become encoded, and go onto the archive website. He serves as the project coordinator for the William Blake Archive. Loy is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. If you want to find all of the images with an angel with feathered wings who appear alongside little boys with dogs, you can do that-and you can do it fast. Now they’re the basis for an image search that really works. For two decades, we’ve been compiling excruciatingly detailed textual descriptions of each image. The other was always present in the archive, but it’s been the least understood feature of the site: the ability to search for the contents of an image. One is a deep comparison function that lets you compare works that are alike, or that are akin to each other, in various ways. There are two really remarkable things about the new site. And we wanted to add one of the things we lacked from the beginning: very efficient, easy navigation across the site. We wanted to maintain all the functions we already had, but we wanted them to work in better ways. We knew that there was a potential for creating this much sleeker piece of software. And the old archive didn’t only look like 1996 it really did function like 1996, but with a lot of things added to it-like a car with improvements that still functioned pretty much like the old car. The original site began to take shape in the early 1990s. What’s new in the redesigned Blake Archive? ![]() I think we’re the only ones in that position.” “There are many journals devoted to Romantic writers, and there are several digital projects related to those writers-but they don’t have anything to do with each other. ![]() “It’s not as if they’re two different entities, and we think that’s unprecedented,” says Eaves. Interweaving the journal and the archive allows scholars to move seamlessly between the two. It complements the leading academic journal for Blake studies, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, which is also coedited by Eaves and marks the 50th anniversary of its founding this year. The redesigned archive was nominated for an international Digital Humanities Award in the category of Best Digital Humanities Tool. Turner Professor of Humanities at Rochester-now holds almost 7,000 images from 45 of the world's research libraries and museums, and a transformative redesign, launched in December, makes the site more accessible than ever before. The archive-co-edited by Morris Eaves, a professor of English and the Robert L. For the first time, the archive fully brought together Blake's writings and illustrations, as he had originally produced them. Two decades ago, the William Blake Archive-sponsored by the University with the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-set out to take advantage of the possibilities of digital media.
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