Blake Archive at ADE 2012

This past week in Charlottesville, I had the opportunity to attend two events hosted by the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE). The first of these was “camp edit,” or the Institute for Editing Historical Documents. In a week of seminars we covered a range of editing and publishing topics, from transcription, document search, and annotation to project management, modes of publication, and fundraising. I was glad to find this year’s program emphasized questions raised by digital technologies in addition to its core curriculum of transcription, annotation, proofing, indexing, project management, and publication. A session on digital tools for editing led by Andy Jewell, of the Willa Cather Archive and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was supplemented by conversations linking traditional scholarly editing topics to some of Andy’s experiences in the digital realm at UNL and before that with the Whitman Archive.

Some topics from the old core curriculum appeared less relevant to our work at the Blake Archive at first, but I found many underlying principles could inform our own practices, even where the means may be quite different. For example, during the session on indexing led by William Ferraro of the George Washington papers, I wasn’t sure that I would gain much practical knowledge as an assistant to a digital project without a traditional book index. As the seminar continued, however, I found myself thinking of indexing less as a way to direct users to specific pages in a book and more as a practice in the kind of constrained vocabulary description and document linking that power the searching, browsing, and sorting within a digital edition. We may have more options for how we structure those connections in a digital edition, but there is no less of a premium on transparency, usefulness, and efficiency for users in the way we structure relationships between objects and content.

Having previous to my ADE experience spent little time around historical editions, I never quite got used to all the talk of “documents” at camp edit or in the ADE meeting that followed it. At the Blake Archive we usually only say “documents” to refer to the documentation we generate in the process of editing “works” and “objects”. This difference in speaking had me thinking about the questions I wanted to address in my own presentation to the ADE regarding how the manuscripts and letters projects in the Blake Archive have brought about some interesting changes in the way that editorial definitions based on the earlier illuminated books and visual designs have been applied and rationalized. I gleaned from the enthusiastic reception of an earlier presenter’s questioning of the durability of digital editions (she said she’d migrate to a digital edition when someone could show her how to read an electronic text without electricity, bringing to my mind the Olympic ads for NBC’s upcoming post-apocalyptic “Revolution”) that my intended discussion of some of the peculiarities of our XML tag set for manuscript transcriptions might not be the most compelling choice for the group assembled. In my presentation about the letters in our edition not in Blake’s hand, titled “Complicated Correspondence: Editing the Letters William Blake Did Not Write,” I expanded on some of the less overtly technical repercussions of earlier precedents set in the Blake Archive to the work we’re doing now on new types of objects and works. My argument was that the usages of “works”, “copies,” and “objects,” even when used as literally and diplomatically as they have been in the Blake Archive, become another layer of technology mediating users’ access to content. As much a technology as the codex or digital machines used to flip or navigate pages, these terms require continual re-inspection as they are applied to new ends.

Along these lines, I am excited to hear our editors are planning to push more of the documentation for the Archive onto the public site in the near future. Hopefully such a move will encourage us to keep our editorial machinery well oiled, in addition to providing a resource for other editorial projects.

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly: Summer 2012 issue

The summer 2012 issue (vol. 46 no. 1) of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly features:

Articles

• “William Blake and His Circle:  Publications and Discoveries in 2011,” by G. E. Bentley, Jr.
• “Translating Blake’s Jerusalem into Polish,” by Eliza Borkowska

Reviews

• Sarah Haggerty, Blake’s Gifts:  Poetry and the Politics of Exchange, reviewed by Grant F. Scott
• Robert N. Essick, ed., Blake:  Songs of Innocence and of Experience, reviewed by Alexander S. Gourlay

Journal News

• Beginning with this issue Blake is being published online only.  But a hard-copy version of the issue–in color, like the online version–can be purchased from the print-on-demand vendor MagCloud.  We are making it available to subscribers only at the moment, and at cost (the summer issue is $12.00 for 60 pages at 20c each).
• From the homepage, a news feature and a variety of bonus content are available to nonsubscribers as well as subscribers .
• Upcoming issues will include articles on Blake’s Hebrew calligraphy (Abraham Samuel Shiff) and on sympathy and pity in The Book of Urizen (Sarah Eron).
• The editors encourage nonsubscribers to take a look at the homepage and table of contents of the current issue.  Subscribers have access to the fully searchable, illustrated content in both HTML and PDF formats.

Online publication is made possible by Open Journal Systems and close cooperation with a team of experts at the Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.

Forty years of back issues (1968-2008) are being integrated into the William Blake Archive.  Access to the most recent five years of back issues will be restricted to subscribers only.

Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley, Editors

Sarah Jones, Managing Editor

Alexander S. Gourlay, Book Review Editor

G.E. Bentley, Jr., Bibliographer

Publication Announcement – Engraved illustrations to Flaxman’s Compositions from the Works Days and Theogony of Hesiod

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of Blake’s etchings/engravings of John Flaxman’s Compositions from the Works Days and Theogony of Hesiod (1817). Both the designs and the inscribed texts are fully searchable.

The thirty-seven Hesiod plates are one of Blake’s major endeavors as a commercial etcher/engraver of designs by other artists. Flaxman began to sketch designs based on Hesiod’s poems in the early 1790s, but it was not until February 1816 that he entered into a contract with Longman & Co. to compose a series of illustrations for publication. Blake had already been commissioned to execute the plates, almost certainly on the recommendation of Flaxman, a friend of many years. The publisher began to receive proof impressions in November 1814; the project was completed by January 1817. Blake, who received very few other engraving commissions during this period, was paid 5 guineas (£5.5s.) for each plate, a total of £194.5s. Without the Hesiod project, Blake and his wife Catherine might have descended into dire poverty.

Blake executed the Hesiod illustrations in an unusual graphic style. Rather than continuous outlines, found in the engravings of Flaxman’s other classical compositions, Blake used stippled lines—that is, lines composed of dots. It is surprising to see Blake, who wrote in a letter of 1827 that “a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s],” deploying a technique that divides lines into points. Perhaps he was responding to the character of Flaxman’s preliminary drawings, now untraced, upon which the etchings/engravings were based. If these were in soft pencil, then stippled lines would be an appropriate equivalent. It is also possible that Flaxman or his publisher directed Blake to use this style.

Flaxman’s classical compositions were influenced by, and often understood as recreations of, Greek and Etruscan vase paintings. His illustrations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and of Dante’s Divine Comedy were published, or at least engraved, in 1793. They soon became famous and highly influential throughout Europe. These were followed by designs for the tragedies of Aeschylus in 1795 and Blake’s Hesiod engravings in 1817. Blake also contributed three plates to the 1805 revised publication of the Iliad illustrations; these are forthcoming in the Archive.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager; William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

Transcribing A Descriptive Catalogue

As Nick has discussed in a previous post, preparing transcriptions of typographical works presents its own, unique set of challenges; challenges that I’m starting to realise multiply exponentially as we tackle more and more different works.

A few weeks ago, I began work on a transcription of A Descriptive Catalogue, a prospectus written by Blake to describe an 1809 exhibition of his works. It is a printed text, and so I was feeling (fairly!) prepared to encounter the various types of issues that I had seen in Gilchrist’s Life, such as deciding whether or not to transcribe elements like page numbers and running headers that are part of the book, but not written by Blake. However, I soon discovered that the Catalogue includes a few short annotations by Blake handwritten directly onto the printed page.

This result is a text with two different “hands” (one printed and one handwritten) and two very distinct moments of writing and possibly of composition. We can’t guess whether Blake is inserting a correction because the printed book contains an error or whether he is editing his own prose at a later stage. Is it enough to merely point out that these annotations exist in an editorial note because they are an addition to the printed text made after its publication?  Or should they be included formally as part of the textual transcription because they are by the same author?  The Archive’s commitment to providing a transcription that is “specific to individual objects” could point to either solution.  Given the nature of printed books, should we consider all books from one print run to be a single object, or does it mean each different copy? If it is the former, then I should probably transcribe the printed text and include the handwritten addition as a sort of editorial curiosity; if it is the latter, then including the annotation as part of the transcription would be the best plan.

Either way, this is neither the first thorny transcription question, nor is it the last! So expect more, and hopefully some decisions and solutions along the way too.

Report from DHSI 2012

I’m currently at the end of day 3 of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, where I’m participating in a session on “Issues in Large Project Planning and Management” taught by Lynne Siemens of the University of Victoria School of Public Administration. Lynne has several well-researched articles on DH project management under her belt and is involved with a large interdisciplinary project in Canada (INKE), so she seems like a good person to be learning this from.

Having managed a large DH project myself for the last 5 years (the Blake Archive has 23 staff members, including editors, graduate assistants, and undergraduate work study help), I wasn’t sure whether I was going to learn much in this session. And indeed, the general principles–communication, collaboration, cooperation–are familiar to me; I’ve learned them on the job in this and previous project management/media production positions. Where the course is really helping me, though, is in conceptualizing project management as a step-by-step process: making inventories of necessary skills and required tasks; breaking down workflows into their constituent tasks and assigning those tasks to team members; identifying bottlenecks where the project can’t move forward until certain tasks are completed; and maintaining documentation (a particular weakness of mine). We’re also learning about software tools and templates for project management, including the almighty Gantt chart. When I get back to the Archive next week (just in time for Blake Camp) I’ll begin gradually implementing some of these new skills I’ve learned.

One small quibble with the organization of the event: there are 17 seminars offered at DHSI this year. 15 of these seminars–the ones on GIS, augmented reality, XSLT, databases, and other high-tech subjects–are spread across three main buildings. The remaining two–my seminar on project management and another on the “predigital book”–are taking place in separate buildings (separate from each other and from the main three). So the pattern is: techie people get to hang out together in the main buildings; non-techies are tucked away in isolated corners. The DH community prides itself on its egalitarianism, but sometimes the new meritocracy of techie vs non-techie just replaces the old hierarchy of full prof, assistant prof, grad student.

Publication Announcement – Europe a Prophecy, copy D

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Europe a Prophecy copy D, from the British Museum. Europe, extant in nine copies, is dated 1794 on its title plate. The first six copies were color printed that year; four of these copies were printed on both sides of the leaves and two were printed on one side only. Copy D belongs to the former issue and joins in the Archive copies E and G from the same issue and copy B, more heavily color printed, from the latter. It also joins copy H, the only monochrome copy printed by Blake, produced in 1795, and copy K, from the last printing session, c. 1821. With each printing session represented in the Archive, users can trace the full printing history of Europe.

A unique feature of Europe copy D is the pen and ink inscriptions in the hand of Blake’s friend George Cumberland. These are quotations from a number of literary works, apparently added as glosses on the designs, and constitute one of the few contemporary responses to the pictorial images in Blake’s illuminated books. Ozias Humphry, the first owner of copy D, apparently lent the volume to Cumberland, who copied most of the inscriptions from Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry. With our “Related Works in the Archive” feature in the Show Me menu on the object view pages, users can access the untrimmed sheets with their marginal inscriptions and close ups of each inscription. Blake also executed for Humphry the Large and Small Book of Designs in 1796, published in the Archive in February 2012.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Europe copy D are fully searchable and are supported by our Virtual Lightbox and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated books, and with the Lightbox, users can examine images from any of the works side by side, as well as crop, zoom, and juxtapose them for close study.

New protocols for transcriptions, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to copy D and to all the Europe texts previously published. With the publication of Europe copy D the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 81 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager

William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

Blake’s Letters

       The Blake Archive has been preparing an electronic edition of selected letters by William Blake that will be published in installments over the course of the year. This edition, for which I have acted as a project assistant since 2010, has raised several challenges to the technical and editorial practices established in the archive’s earlier editions of Blake’s illuminated books, illustrations, and other visual designs. In a presentation called “Complicated Correspendonce” at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) in Charlottesville, VA this August, I am looking forward to sharing these issues and the diplomatic responses being made to address them at the Blake Archive. I am also fortunate to have the chance to bring some of these questions with me to “Camp Edit,” the Summer Institute for Editing Historical Documents, which I will be attending in the lead-up to the ADE conference.

       Of special interest, to me at least, are those pieces of correspondence that are not directly from Blake’s hand, but are too useful and critically valuable to exclude from an archive dedicated to his work. These documents, included in the standard print editions of Blake’s letters by G.E. Bentley, Geoffrey Keynes, and David V. Erdman, include contemporary letters to or about Blake by his friends, as well as a series of historically important letters from Blake to his sometime friend and patron William Hayley. The latter of these documents are now lost or destroyed, existing only through quotations and transcriptions published in an expanded 1880 edition of the first, posthumous biography of Blake, initially issued in 1863. The composition and publication history of this biography makes matters even less certain, as it was left unfinished at the death of its original author, Alexander Gilchrist. Gilchrist’s death left the completion of the first edition of the biography, and the expansions for the later second edition that include the letters by Blake in question, to a very loosely documented collaboration between multiple contributors and editors, including his widow Anne Gilchrist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and others.

       How, for example, should page 209 of The Life of William Blake (1880), including an unattested transcription of a letter by William Blake to William Hayley of May 4, 1804, be presented in a digital edition?

              How might we distinguish the object by Blake and the surrounding material put there by the editors of his biography?

              How might we best call attention to the uncertain status of the text in our visual presentation, editorial notes, and transcriptions?

              How should we use the mixed digital media of the Blake Archive to do these things?

       These sets of “complicated correspondence” will bring new agents, types of objects, and editorial precedents into the archive, and I hope to post some further updates about the progress of both the typographic and manuscript letters as these move toward publication over the coming weeks and months.

Navigating the “Technotext”: _Between Page and Screen_

Author Amaranth Borsuk and computer programmer Brad Bouse have collaborated to create Between Page and Screen, a new kind of reading experience that requires both a physical book and a computer (with a webcam). The husband and wife team envisioned a creative project that would harness new and old technologies to give readers a revolutionary way to engage with a text. The abstract black shapes on the book’s pages are “activated” by a webcam, revealing the encoded narrative (which itself takes the form of letters between the characters P and S).

This also means that, in order to read the story, the reader has to continuously see him/herself in the webcam. The relationship between text and reader is playfully highlighted as the reflected reader figures out the interface (you have to hold the book upside-down to avoid mirror writing) and moves through the narrative.

Navigating the multiple mediations that exist between a reader and a story can sometimes be akin to working through a mystery via a set of incomplete clues. Reading can feel very much like a process of unlocking. Think about reading a book that beings in media res. As a reader, you’re responsible for becoming familiar, as quickly as possible, with the world a writer has created. More experimental novels, like Mark Z. Danielwski’s House of Leaves, set an even higher bar, beckoning readers to follow along through non-linear narratives, nested stories, frustratingly excessive footnotes, and non-traditional layouts.

A sample page from _House of Leaves_ from goodreads.com

At one level, experimentation in writing is nothing new. Lawrence Sterne’s sprawling metafictional Tristram Shandy (completed in 1767) is considered a forerunner for the use of visual writing, and Blake himself was quite the experimenter, expecting a great deal from his readers by creating works that not only combined text and image, but were also based in his own self-contained mythology. Some works, like An Island in the Moon, were elaborate inside jokes. Laocoön and The Four Zoas necessitate the reader’s continual re-engagement with the physical page itself as the text twists and winds outside the borders of typical English left-to-right writing.

Laocoon

However, requiring both a physical book and a computer seems to be a new step. So how does it change things? In an interview with Imprint, the authors of Between Page and Screen noted that

there’s some truth in [the claim that the hallmarks of engaging writing remain largely unchanged despite technological shifts]. But I do believe that the experience of reading a story changes with the medium through which we receive it. “Between Page and Screen” wouldn’t be or do exactly the same thing if the poems were printed in a book. Primacy would be given to the page.

A similar thing could be said about Blake’s Illuminated works. In an age when people bemoan the death of traditional publishing and reading, works like Borsuk and Bouse’s (and Danielwski’s, Sterne’s, and Blake’s) remind us that reading is always changing — and change is good. It’s exciting to think about what other collaborations between writers and programmers could produce.

Read Imprint’s article and interview with the authors (reprinted on Salon.com) here, and order your copy of Between Page and Screen at sigliopress.com (use coupon code “SPINTO” for a 20% off discount!). Limited copies are available on this initial print run. I just ordered my copy, and I’ll update on what I find out!

Managing Projects at the Blake Archive

The Blake Archive has people all over the place. Three editors at three different institutions in three different states, two “teams” of project assistants/graduate students, a Technical Editor (grad student), Project Manager (grad student), and Project Coordinator (grad student—that’s me!).

The domain of Team Rochester (or more informally, BAND: Blake Archive Northern Division) is Blake’s manuscripts and (more recently) typographic editions. Our first publication was Island in the Moon and we’re currently working on electronic editions of Blake’s letters, the Genesis Manuscript, Poetical Sketches, and Four Zoas. Typically, teams of project assistants work together on a single text or group of texts (as in the case of the letters), but sometimes individuals work alone on “easy” manuscripts (which is really a misnomer for anything of Blake’s).

As the job title (Project Coordinator) implies, my job is to coordinate projects. This means several different things, but mainly I keep track of who’s working on what at the UR and I coordinate BAND’s activities with the Project Manager, Ashley, at UNC. The digital heart of the Blake Archive—its servers—is at UNC. Which means that the work we do at the UR involves complicated procedures to log in securely from far away. BAND is also the newest “wing” to the Blake Archive. Combine a bunch of people relatively new to the Blake Archive and the world of electronic textual editing with the labyrinthine world of servers, “tunnels,” and “run this command in the terminal window” ["What's a terminal window??!"] and you can see the need for some coordination.

At the UR, I keep track of who is working on what and how they’re doing. This is primarily accomplished through our weekly staff meetings, for which I set agendas (and during which another project assistant takes minutes). These get posted to BAND’s Google Site, which we use to keep track of things like meeting minutes, technical documentation (for example, the XML tagset for transcribing manuscripts), project documentation (such as proofreading questions), and the links we use frequently. We had been using Blackboard for a while, but we recently migrated to a Google Site, and that seems to work really well for us.

One of the advantages of using a Google Site is that it plays well with Google Docs, which we use extensively. All of our project tracking and proofreading takes place in and through shared Google Docs. As team members begin transcribing and encoding Blake’s text into XML, questions tend to arise. At that point, someone will start a Google Doc for that project, record their questions, and then share it with the rest of BAND. Some of the easier questions (such as “Do we transcribe the handwriting of librarians or archivists?” (Answer: no)) will be answered via the comment feature, or in differently formatted text. Trickier questions (by far the more common species) we address during our weekly meetings, and occasionally escalate to the Blake Archive’s listserv, which gives non-UR folks (typically the other editors, the Project Manager, and/or the Technical Editor) a chance to weigh in.

Once a MS has been transcribed and encoded, it’s ready to be proofed. Once again, we record errors (such as typos) and questions (“Is that a comma or a period?”) in a Google Doc. BAND spends a lot of time scrutinizing small details and discussing at length whether or how to record/transcribe/encode something. In a few seconds and with just a few clicks, project assistants can neatly snip a close-up of whatever mark, letter, word, or line they have a question about and insert that into the proofreading document. Having images right next to specific interpretive questions makes our detailed discussions (which have been known to induce brain-death and existential confusion) about things like dashes much easier to manage. In fact, our reliance on these kinds of images contributed to one of the new features in the Archive, which debuted with Island in the Moon: text-note images in the editorial notes to help explain particularly knotty editorial cruxes. Here’s an example from Object 2 of Island in the Moon:

One last word about managing the work of proofreading. We just started using a Google Survey to make proofing more consistent. Nick Wasmoen, one of the project assistants at the UR, built a proofreading form in Googledocs, which we now use for all of our proofreading. It details everything a proofer needs to check, from typos in the title to errors in copy information or the transcription. Using the document maintains consistency in proofing across texts—this is especially important as we all proofread each other’s work, and this ensures that we all look at and for the same things.

Another aspect of my work at the Blake Archive is being the link between BAND and the folks at UNC—especially the Blake Archive Project Manager, Ashley. When BAND members run into problems I can’t solve (such as log-in issues on the server) or questions I can’t answer, I talk to Ashley. We have regular video chats, during which we share updates about project progress and I get to ask lots and lots of questions about how and why the Archive works the way it does. We’re using Google Video Chat, which seems to work well a majority of the time. We occasionally have issues where one of us can neither be seen nor heard, but it usually works.

Sometimes I’m conflicted about relying so much on Google for tracking and managing our collaborative editing projects. But it’s just so easy! And free! And right there! And easy! And when you spend hours scrutinizing ink splotches or determining whether that “s” is *really* capitalized, “easy” works.

Allen Ginsberg on the Book of Urizen

The Allen Ginsberg Project has recently begun publishing unedited transcriptions of Ginberg’s lectures on the First Book of Urizen, given in 1978 at the Naropa Institute. When the serialization is complete, there should be about 12 lectures available. The preliminary lecture is here and includes a brief bibliography and other first-day basics. I imagine the first day of a Blake seminar led by Allen Ginsberg would have been a little more exciting than your average first day of class!

The second lecture, on the Gnostic background of Urizen, is here. Ginsberg gives a nice crash course in Gnosticism and also ties the ideas into Buddhist principles, like vajra, or intellect. In his useful comparison of vajra and Urizen, he notes that

In Buddhism, vajra quality can also have its corrupted or perverted opposite, where you have an excess of vajra, where everything is complete intellect and cutting through (perhaps cynical or destructive intellect, or negative intellect, or intellect that’s so solidified and impacted that it doesn’t allow for any feeling, or any richness, or any generosity, or any work…).

He also talks about Urizen as an apt figure for modernity, which also requires people to deal with “titanic forms,” like the atom bomb. Ginsberg also gives a good bit of background in this lecture on Blake’s social circle and his ties to figures like William Godwin and the Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor.

The third lecture, on Urizen and Milton, is rich with analysis and connections to contemporary issues (like politics and drug culture). It also includes an aside on Milton’s apparitional visit to Blake at Felpham.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lecture four can be found here, and introduces Los, who “gives a body to Falsehood [Urizen] that it may be cast off for ever.” Ginsberg notes that Los gives Urizen a body to

Take it, transform it into something poetically visible, which can then be analyzed, observed, reasoned upon, understood, seen clearly, and related to . . . [to] try and find out his system. Because if you have his system then you’ll have his secret. Then you’ll know wherefrom he comes, how he operates, why he’s doing what he’s doing and what his functioning is. And every Satan has a system.

The next lecture should be up next week at some point, and promises to be fascinating!