The
William Blake Archive: The Medium when the Millenium is the Message
Morris Eaves,
Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi
It is easier than most people probably suppose to be
millennial about editing. The
closest thing to religious hope left to most of us may be found in the dreams
of editors as they come to think of themselves as, modestly, the temporary
guardians of important messages hurling down perilous lines of transmission
from origin to unknown ultimate destination or, less modestly, as the
foundation builders of a new age of enlightenment and understanding built on a
cornerstone of perfect communication.
All editors live vicariously through their authors,
and Blake left no room for doubting the significance that he attributed to his
works. He made claims to having
tapped ancient veins of sacred communication and commanded readers to
"Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation” (Milton 2:25,
Erdman, p. 96) as he promised them that his works put in their hands the ends
of golden strings that would lead to the
foundations of Jerusalem (Jerusalem
77, Erdman, p. 231). [1] His "prophetic books," as
over decades they came to be known, bear an array of deeply mythical and
religious titles that assert their importance cloaked in a veil of
unfamiliarity: Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, Europe a
Prophecy, Jerusalem: The Emanation
of the Giant Albion. Gradually, he managed to enlarge and
elevate their momentousness even further by learning to suggest, through
continuities of character, setting, and plot, that they might potentially be
individual episodes in a single coherent narrative with the incorporated power
to defeat the forces of created time and space and to connect any present life
to an archetypal continuum from an ancient past to a profoundly desirable
millennial future.
The scope, however, of Blake's communication has —
fortunately for editors — been equally profoundly restricted by two factors, the
obscurity of his magnificent messages and the grotesque inadequacies of
conventional means to preserve and transmit the body of work that has come to
seem, over two centuries, the most significant. By writing his texts backward with a quill in an acid-resistant
liquid onto copper, and using the same substance to create designs with a
combination of painters' and etchers’ tools, Blake could use conventional
etchers' acids to create plates with printable surfaces in relief. After printing them on his own press
with the assistance of his wife Catherine, he and she could share some of the
work of watercoloring the impressions, separately or in batches as needed. The process was appealingly domestic
and autographic, as well as reasonably fast, flexible, and inexpensive, at
least by comparison with the standard methods of reproductive engraving. Both the form and its range of
aesthetic effects seemed new enough to warrant a new name. Blake christened his works in the
medium "Illuminated Books" in "Illuminated Printing"
(Prospectus of 1793, Erdman, p. 693).
Two aspects of the illuminated books — the obscurity of the content and the
difficulty of adequately reproducing the form — open an abyss of potential
confusion for all the "readers" who have discovered Blake somewhere
in the fields of "posterity" where he invested his hope for a
posthumous artistic future as prospects of a contemporary audience dwindled in
his later years: "Posterity will judge by our Works" (Public
Address, Erdman, p. 572). No one has done more to make clear
judgment of these works possible than Morton Paley: in The Continuing City (1983)
and in several later books he captured, for the first time, the musculoskeletal
system of Jerusalem, the conceptual structure that gives form to the visual-textual
body of Blake’s most complex millennial vision. This was a major achievement, but one whose magnitude was
at first difficult to appreciate fully because in the 1980s there was no adequate
edition
of the very object of Paley's pioneering historical and critical attention, at
least none outside rare book collections.
Most people who wanted to make the best of The Continuing City,
that is to say, could not readily follow
Paley’s lead because the anchoring landmark, Jerusalem, was missing.
They would have to take refuge in one of the standard printed editions,
an unfortunate choice because, no matter how indispensable those are, no more
than half of Jerusalem, the
"textual" half, makes it through the filter of the press into their
pages. This, some may imagine, may
usefully reduce the demands of an exceedingly demanding work on the reader, but
it does so by radically distorting Blake's artistic experiment and drastically
shrinking the sum of information available for making sense of it. There may indeed be ways to simplify Jerusalem,
and simplifying it isn't necessarily a bad idea, [2] but
it would be extraordinarily coincidental if the line of useful simplification
should happen to fall between text and image just because a
machine has chosen that as the point of separation. Paley himself put text and image back together in 1991 by
producing for the Blake Trust an illuminated edition of the only complete
colored copy of Jerusalem that
Blake ever created (Copy E). [3]
The three of us felt especially fortunate to have
Paley's carefully crafted Jerusalem
in the background as we edited further illuminated books for two of the
remaining volumes of the Blake Trust edition. Yet though we were (and are) proud of the work we did and of
the accomplishment of the series as a whole, we gradually came to realize how
severe the limitations of a printed edition of Blake are. Many of those limitations have to do
with the economics of publishing.
For example, most of Blake’s nineteen illuminated works survive in
more than one copy and often in several copies — each with its own
history and features of interest. The Blake Trust edition took the expected and
entirely rational course of printing a single "copy" of each
"book," that is, each "work," if a work is the entity
represented by the title (all the "copies" of the Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, for
instance), even though there has been sustained critical interest in multiple
copies of the books, and even though only a remarkably small subset of the
books — not even a useful cross-section — has ever been reproduced. But it is
simply inconceivable that anyone will finance printed editions of all the
surviving copies, or even of a critically and bibliographically meaningful
sample of all copies. Considering the range of differences in printing style
and coloring, not to mention textual differences and differing arrangements of
plates, such limitations are harsh at best, at worst fatal to the chances of
achieving an enlightened understanding of the artist’s work. The same technical, economic, and
institutional limitations impinge on the quality of the reproductions and the
number of pages allotted per volume, which in turn restricts the content.
These are facts of life that may be all too well
known. But editing Blake's
illuminated books, which were created in a medium and under conditions very
different from those created by conventional print publication, puts an unusual
degree of stress on these limitations.
Failure, to some significant degree, is practically assured. And "practically" carries a
world of meaning here, because Blake's apocalyptic message was anything but
practical, as all the world knows.
He claimed to have "invented" illuminated printing in hopes of
solving a previously insoluble problem for British "Genius": "not even Milton and Shakespeare
could publish their own works" (Prospectus of 1793, Erdman, pp. 692-93)
— that is, until now, in the new medium he had "discovered.” But clearly he had more in mind than
the ready propagation of printed poems, because the prospectus begins with a
tribute to the under-compensated "Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the
Musician," lays the blame on "a neglect of means to propagate"
their works — which would include images and musical scores as well as poems
— and goes on from Milton and Shakespeare to describe a "method of
Printing both Letter-press and Engraving." In the early trials of his new medium he seems to have
realized that it would be especially well suited to deliver enriched messages
that could not be carried by letterpress (the standard for words) or engraving
(the standard for pictures) alone.
Even as he came to understand, as in the long run he must have, the hard
truth that his invention was not as wide in application, not as practical, as
he might have imagined in his first flush of enthusiasm, he continued until
nearly the end of his life to find new uses for it — a millennial medium, one
might say, for millennial messages.
Jerusalem is in that way
its logical culmination, and, for editors as for readers, it is the Mount
Everest of illuminated printing.
The dominant tradition of Blake editing has been
overwhelmingly literary, ruthlessly discarding visual information. On the art-historical flank a
productive scholarly tradition of cataloguing has been complementary to but
largely disconnected from its editorial counterpart on the literary flank. Consequently, many students and even
professional scholars know either the textual or visual side of Blake’s
work but not both, despite their interconnections at the source. But just
before the curtain fell on the old millennium it was clear that those
circumstances no longer prevailed.
We witnessed the fortunate confluence of four phenomena during one brief
span of time in the early 1990s: the completion of a broad base of mature and
sophisticated Blake scholarship, capped by the publication of the first
trustworthy map of the history of Blake’s illuminated-book production;
the appearance of a technological formation sufficiently revolutionary to alter
some fundamental assumptions in scholarly editing; the emergence of sound new
technical standards sufficiently robust to check, if not eliminate, the
formidable threat of overnight obsolescence for large electronic editorial
undertakings; and, finally, the creation of an organization specifically
devoted to giving technological form to the ideas of humanists. Together these four events combined to
provide the cornerstone of integrated archival, editorial, and educational
initiatives that would have been impossible ten years, and probably too risky
even five years, earlier.
Around the same time the technological assumptions on
which editing and cataloguing had by necessity rested for the past several
hundred years altered suddenly and radically under the influence of global
network computing, which opened new perspectives on those old assumptions and
the procedures that flowed from them and created new opportunities for
achieving the previously unattainable.
The Internet and World Wide Web made it possible to conceive a
long-distance professional collaboration and an “edition” of Blake
that would challenge the limitations of conventional scholarly editing and in
the process close some of the gaps between the original works in restricted
collections, the incomplete sets of expensive facsimiles in the rare-book
collections of some large libraries, and the indispensable but highly
misleading printed editions on which readers had relied for their Blake since
the Victorian Blake revival.
It was this line of thought that first led us to
wonder if the time had come to consider editing Blake in another medium. Changing media does not make problems
disappear, for there will inevitably be losses as well as gains, but in
changing the fundamental conditions it alters the nature and number of the
problems, and what little we knew of the digital medium made us hope that it
might eliminate some major problems outright, reduce some others, and offer
unprecedented capabilities – functions — that would make the inevitable
tradeoffs seem worth it. We were
very unclear about what those tradeoffs might be, or what would be involved in
trying to convert Blake into digital bits and turning "works" into
"files" in computer "databases." When we began tossing these thoughts around in 1992 and
1993, encouraged by Jerome McGann and John Unsworth at the University of
Virginia, the World Wide Web was barely peeking over (our) far horizon, and the
most common "browser," an exotic new word at the time, was still Mosaic. Our uncertainty about the nature of the
promise of what we came to know under an expanding set of terms as networked
desktop computing, humanities computing, information technology, and new media,
however, was itself part of the attraction — the allure of the half-known. The
founding of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at
the University of Virginia, with Unsworth as its director, gave us hope that
our nearly millennial dream could be realized.
As we shall go on to explain, that busy intersection
of old problems and new opportunities led to the first thought-experiments that
in turn led to the crude initial prototypes of a "William Blake
Archive" <www.blakearchive.org>. It also led to the priority we
granted to the illuminated books — which were, after all, only one of several
major compartments of Blake's oeuvre,
but their historical and critical dominance, our own recent editorial
experience with them in the Blake Trust series, and, perhaps especially, the
technical problems they presented in dealing with images and texts, made us
decide to tackle them first. The
challenges of the new medium, however, made us decide to reverse the priority
that the Blake Trust had granted to the blockbuster Jerusalem. Any
mistakes we made in handling its 100 plates would be all the harder to undo,
and any technical advances that occurred would be all the harder to
incorporate. We decided instead to
start with the eight plates of The Book of Thel and hold Jerusalem for last.
Getting it done would be, we thought, a kind of signal that we had
finally arrived at the point where we could make our first big leap to the
other categories of Blake’s work. The remainder of this paper will
outline the discoveries we have made and the new things that are now possible,
but also the hopes that have eluded us, the compromises we have learned to live
with, and the limits, some old and some new, that we have accepted.
Multimedia
Editing in an Electronic Environment
As
we mentioned, in 1993 we made an initial trial of our basic editorial
principles and procedures in two printed volumes of the second Blake Trust
series, William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books and William Blake: "Milton a Poem" and
the Final Illuminated Works. Their
reproductions, based on large-format transparencies, were rigorously controlled
for color fidelity, and we devised a multi-layered editorial apparatus that we
thought optimized the presentation of books in which graphic and textual
elements converge. Some fundamental tenets of the editorial approach that we
applied to the printed volumes seemed precisely correct for the Blake Archive,
and we have adopted and extended them; others, including the principle of
selection, were almost inconceivable in print but are within the reach of
electronic editions.
Principles
of inclusion: Our printed volumes in
the Blake Trust series presented the best current information about the
production of Blake's individual illuminated books, drawn chiefly from
Viscomi's revisionist scholarship in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993). But in those volumes it was not feasible to
reproduce more than a single copy of each work — and many of the copies most
relevant to the history of production have never been reproduced. We are
building the Archive on principles that, while we cannot ignore practical
limitations that apply to electronic scholarly resources as to any other kind,
incorporate a history of Blake's artistic production for the first time into an
edition.
As we indicated previously, we chose the illuminated
books as our starting point for several reasons: their historical and artistic
value, the editorial and technical challenges they present, their relative
coherence as an extensive group, the difficulties that their fragility and
their widely dispersed present locations have created for scholars, and a new
map of their place in Blake's lifetime of artistic labor. We saw the
illuminated books, once we had substantially achieved our first-phase goal of
including one copy from every printing of every book, as a kind of archival and
editorial backbone for the project.
That backbone supports a twofold strategy: to evolve
along lines that will achieve the greatest possible coverage of the range of
Blake's work while at the same time maintaining the greatest possible degree of
scholarly coherence. We maintain
coherence by expanding the core with works that are closely related
(historically, thematically, physically, etc.) to the core, and by giving priority to significant
interrelated clusters (clustered by medium, such as the large color prints of
1795, by subject or theme, such as the Job and Milton illustrations in several
media, etc.). Whenever possible, we assemble these individual clusters into
larger ones. For instance, by the end of phase two Blake's work as a printmaker
in several graphic media will be extraordinarily well represented — here again
by expanding outward from the core of the illuminated books (typically
watercolored relief etchings) to the other works designed and engraved by him,
and then to those designed by him but engraved by others, and finally to those
designed by others but engraved by him. We shall also incorporate Blake's
typographical works, which are all rare or unique, and his manuscripts.
Fundamental
units: The priority that we grant to
the media, methods, and histories of artistic production has dictated a feature
of the Archive that influences virtually every aspect of it. It is utterly
fundamental: we emphasize the physical object — the plate, page, or canvas
— over the logical textual unit — the poem or other work abstracted from its
physical medium. This emphasis
coincides with our archival as well as with our editorial objectives.
Those central principles have too many implications
to
discuss fully here, but suffice it to say that they shape the entire editorial
strategy, from the underlying structure of the SGML architecture, [4] to
the treatment of texts and pictures, to the user's dynamic position among those
texts and pictures. The part-to-whole path reinforced by print — which
typically starts with a reading of Blake's "poems" (often, in fact,
transcriptions extracted from illuminated pages) and may or may not move along
to a later, secondary look at "illustrations" (which often turn out
to be a predetermined editorial selection of the pictures that seem most
relevant to the words) — is reversed.
Users of the Blake Archive are positioned primarily not as readers but
as viewers of a visual field in which readable text may (or may not) be
embedded. That situation will vary
from “plate” to “plate,” or, more broadly,
“object” to “object.”
Perhaps the best way of describing our methodology is
to present a brief account of some of its consequences, as they shape the
choices available. [5] A user looking for a work in the
Archive typically moves down through the SGML hierarchy that is fundamental to
the design of the whole. The
user selects Works from the primary Table of
Contents page. From the Works in the . . . Archive page, the user selects a category from this
comprehensive list (illus. 1)
and
then proceeds hierarchically to an index of available works in that category
(Illuminated Books, the only category
currently operative). Selecting a particular work (say The Book of Thel) in turn produces an index of copies available in the
Archive (currently copies F, H, and O from the Library of Congress and J from
the Houghton Library). This “generic work-view” page also includes
a brief introduction to the work and a full list of all extant copies and their
current locations. A link provides access to a bibliography of critical studies
of Thel.
Selecting one plate from an index of plates in a copy
of Thel, the user moves to a
reproduction of the physical object, perhaps plate 3 of copy O. This, the
"object view," is the fundamental level of the Archive, to which all
else is oriented (illus.2).
Here we integrate the reproductions of individual
objects into an array of tools and information sources that allow further
investigation of the physical object itself and of its meanings in context.
Each tool and information source has a designated place within the total
scheme, and each is available to the user by means of a hypertextual link —
which requires only a click of the mouse.
From this point, our object-centered methodology can
be most readily seen in the guidelines and standards we apply to the editing of
texts, the reproduction of pictures, and the informational contexts that we
supply for both, and, finally, in the tools we give users to create their own
information.
Edited
texts: Transcriptions of texts are,
in the currency of textual criticism, as "diplomatic" as the medium
allows. That is, in line with the archival dimension of our project, our texts
are conservative transpositions of the original into conventional type fonts, retaining
not only Blake's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, but also (for the
first time in a complete edition) an approximation of his page layout. Unlike
printed editions of Blake, which have typically chosen among the textual
features of various copies to produce a single printed text, the texts in
the Archive are specific to individual plates: each transcription is of a particular plate in a particular copy and
no other. Our editorial aids
follow suit. Line numbering, for
example, is strictly documentary.
Rather than key our transcriptions to some standard — or average, since
no standard prevails — derived from the priorities of printed editions, we
number line by line from top to bottom without consideration to the contents of
the lines. Poetry, prose, titles,
part-headings, catchwords — any text that occupies horizontal space is given a
line number for reference (illus. 3)
.
If Blake has mixed different kinds of text on a single plate, as he
often has, then we ignore those differences in the numbering. The arrangement and the contents of
Blake's books often vary markedly from copy to copy. (The Book of Urizen is the easiest example — the arrangement of the
plates is different in every copy, altering both the order of designs and the
narrative sequences.) In general, printed editions such as Erdman's must not
only extract text from plates that are composites of text and design and
convert them to conventional type but also must represent "the work"
as a single work — The
Book of Urizen — rather than as a
collection of different visual and textual orders under one title. In such
printed editions, differences are relegated to the editorial apparatus. In the
Blake Archive, users can easily compare the texts of different etched copies
side by side.
As far as our transcriptions are concerned, however,
our aim is to provide straightforward approximations — searchable and
analyzable representations. We must recognize that they are, however accurate,
necessarily approximations, primarily because any transcription of Blake's irregular etched texts into
the uniformities of conventional print is at best a translation. He can give his hand-drawn punctuation
marks, for example, a variety of expressive graphical features more typical of
handwriting than of printers’ fonts; he can invent punctuation that we
cannot copy. But we can blame the
old print medium for only some of our approximations; others we have to blame
on the state of networked computing, where differences in operating systems,
browsers, and monitors (among other factors) generate a frustrating
proliferation of hard-to-predict variations in the way the “same”
texts display on different monitors.
In practice those variations — in size, color, and spacing —
translate into some very unstable lines of poetry. Throw in a few other differences — different monitors
set at different resolutions, different browsers in different versions, etc.
— and any thought of producing what has been called a “type
facsimile,” a close replica of Blake’s manuscript-style pages in
conventional type forms, must succumb to more realistic expectations. But in this case at least, what the
computer takes away with one hand it gives with the other: we feel no need to resort to elaborate
typography and editorial sigla, the "barbed wire" that Lewis Mumford
famously protested in modern scholarly editions, because the Archive permits
users to examine transcriptions beside superior reproductions of the originals. [6]
Images: Fidelity in the reproduction of images is a top priority.
Reproductions can never be perfect, and our images are not designed to be
"archival" in the sense sometimes intended — virtual copies that
might stand in for originals after a fire. But we recognize that, if we are
going to contribute as we claim to the preservation of fragile originals that
are easily damaged by handling, we must supply reproductions that scholars can
depend upon in their research. Hence our benchmarks are calibrated to produce
images accurate enough to be studied at a level heretofore impossible without
access to the originals. In side-by-side comparisons, images in the Archive are
more faithful to the originals in scale, color, and detail than the best
photomechanical (printed) images in all but the most extraordinary instances. Our standard calls for first-generation
color transparencies in 4 x 5-inch format or larger, with color bars and gray
scales. [7] The main object-view page provides
reproductions
at 100 dots per
inch
[dpi] compressed in JPEG format, a resolution high enough for most purposes.
This image is linked to a 300 dpi enlargement (from the enlargement button at
the bottom of every object-view page), which yields superb detail for close
inspection of printing and coloring (illus. 3).
Our
standards of reproduction are, in short, as high as we believe they can be
under the present technological circumstances. Meanwhile, we try to anticipate
technological advances that may change those circumstances for the better. We have been conducting trials with the
new JPEG2000 (a standard now slated to be set in 2001) and with
"layering" technologies that promise several major advantages in
speed and utility over the present standard once it is widely adopted. But it is worth emphasizing again that
all systems of representation have limits. Most printed pictures obey the rules imposed by halftones;
digitized pictures obey the rules imposed by their imaging algorithms and their
display devices.
The structural priority we are granting to the
physical object is apparent in our response to the art-historical principle
that scale can be a significant
aspect of the experience and meaning of an object. Thus we attempt to account
archivally and editorially for the original size of Blake's works, whether
plates, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, or printed pages. We have done that
in two ways, by displaying the actual size of every object directly beneath it,
and by providing ImageSizer — a Java applet developed at IATH with the Blake
project in mind — as a tool available from every object-view page. Retrieving
the virtual object at its actual size is tricky, given the drastic differences
among computer monitors. ImageSizer allows the user to calibrate and adjust,
very simply, the size of any object — to display its actual size, or the size
that fits the screen, or any convenient smaller or larger size. Here again,
however, we run up against technological limits: as the size of a printed page limits the size of pictures
that can be printed on them, so the size of a monitor limits the size of
pictures that can be displayed.
Even Blake, who never painted a Sistine ceiling and was a good deal more
inclined to keep his images small than many of his contemporaries, produced a
lot of problem cases. Works larger
than 30 x 40 cm., such as the Canterbury Pilgrims watercolor and engraving,
must be reduced manually in size to be viewed in their entirety on a monitor.
The 300 dpi enlargements will still provide a wealth of visual information. [8]
Contextual
information: The Archive strives to
be much more than the gateway to a vast pile of accurate reproductions and
faithful texts. This would be "access" and "preservation"
of a kind, but not a very useful kind, because access depends largely upon
information. The Archive does its best to live up to the principle that works
of art make sense only in context: the texts in the context of the pictures and
vice versa, one illuminated book in the context of others, illuminated books in
the context of drawings and paintings, and all of Blake's works in the context
of historical information about them. Thus each object in the Archive is
embedded in several sources of information, some layered, some overlapping, and
some discrete, but all directly relevant to the "works" that are the
contents of the Archive.
User-generated
information. The principle that
information and access are correlative is nowhere more evident than in the
user's ability to conduct comprehensive searches on texts and images in the
Archive. The power of those searches depends upon the information (about the
content of designs, for instance) that we provide. Users can employ that information in turn to gain access to
additional information and, ultimately, to create new combinations of
information relevant to their specific interests (in Blake's use of a visual
and/or textual motif, for example).
Text searches: From most pages in the Archive, including all object-view pages, the
user can launch searches for any text in the Archive. At present the searchable
texts are restricted to Blake's works, their titles, and the general
illustration descriptions written by the editors, but the aim is to make all texts in the Archive searchable — including all
image descriptions, provenances, textual and object notes, and image-production
records. Searches produce lists of matches or "hits" indexed by
category, work, copy, and plate; choosing among those, the user is taken to
transcriptions where the search-terms are highlighted in color. The search
mechanism is, again, oriented to the individual object. (Users who want more
conventional text searches that treat a poem as a single "work" have
the option of searching the electronic version of Erdman's edition in the
Archive.)
Image Searches: Similarly, the user can launch searches for virtually any combination
of details in any and all of Blake's images. This capability — unique as far
as we know – uses a system of image description, developed by the
editors, which employs a controlled vocabulary of characteristics. These search terms are organized for easy reference
in a set of commonsense categories (figure — including character types and
names, postures, gestures, etc. — animal, vegetation, object, structure, and
text). The user can define a search using up to 19 terms at once (thus, for
instance, simply "male" — a huge category — or, more limited,
"bearded" "nude" "males" who are
"crouching" in "fire" and "holding"
"swords"). Like a text search, an image search produces a list of
hits; choosing among those, the user is taken to textual descriptions of particular
image details and then, choosing among those in turn, taken to plates zoomed
to specific image-details displayed alongside the pertinent descriptions.
New features have expanded the depth and range of the
user's ability to generate and control the information in the Archive from the
object-view page. The most notable
of these are a Comparison feature that allows users viewing any one illuminated
print to compare it instantly with other impressions in the Archive printed
from the same copper plate (illus. 4);
and a Navigator
feature that allows users to move rapidly across the Archive's collections, with
a single click
taking them from any work, copy, and plate, to any other work, copy, and plate.
A
final word on our editorial methodology. Although the Blake Archive is
constructed on an archival editorial rationale that we believe is sound and
fully justified, the overriding goal of the editors is not the maintenance of
theoretical purity but the creation of a superlatively useful and durable scholarly
(and pedagogical) resource that will be available free to all who have the
means of access. Thus, although our online discussion group blake-proj is full of daily debates over minute editorial
issues, we had no difficulty agreeing that we should incorporate David V.
Erdman's standard printed edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake and make its texts
searchable right along with the rest of the Archive. Though it is a fine
edition in its own terms, we are including it not because it jibes with our
theories about editing Blake but because we want the Archive to be much more
than an edition, and we want it to be as convenient as possible to its users,
who will often visit the site with Erdman's edition as their point of
departure. By similar reasoning, we have provided an extensive (and eventually
searchable) bibliography of reference works, biography, and criticism, which we
shall revise and augment at intervals — the first of what we hope will be many
supplementary study aids.
We believe that it is helpful to perceive the Blake
project as an extension of ongoing archival, cataloguing, and editorial
enterprises into a new medium in order to exploit its radical advantages. Until now there has been no base of
knowledge and technology sufficient to conceive, much less execute, an adequate
comprehensive edition of the work of a multimedia artist. On the other hand, the Blake Archive
and the electronic resources that make it possible have to live in the real
world of matter and energy with ink, paper, dirt, flesh, and electrons no less
than William Blake did. The
technical and to some extent the political and economic base may have changed,
but they remain a technical, economic, and political base — a lower limit of
creation, Blake might have said, to which all things, including editorial
things, must respond.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Table of Contents for the Works in the William Blake Archive.
2. Object-View Page for The Book of Thel, copy, O plate 3, with Text & Image Options menu opened showing the following options available to user: Image Enlargement, Illustration Description, Textual Transcription, and Object & Textual Notes.
3. Object-View Page for The Book of Thel, copy, O plate 3, with Transcription, Enlargement, and Illustration Description in child windows.
4. The Book of Thel, copy O, plate 3, with Compare All Copies option evoked, displaying the copies of plate 3 from the other copies of The Book of Thel in the Archive.