Standards, Methods, Objectives of the William Blake Archive:

A Response to Mary Lynn Johnson, Andrew Cooper, and Michael Simpson

Joseph Viscomi, Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Matthew Kirschenbaum *

As the papers in this issue of The Wordsworth Circle attest, both 1998 MLA sessions on William Blake were lively events. Joseph Viscomi, one of the three editors of the William Blake Archive <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake>, presented a slide lecture entitled “Constructing the William Blake Archive: A Progress Report and Demonstration.” His objective was to give a brief tour of the Archive, showing how it can be used for teaching and research, focusing on aspects of the site that have been developed and implemented since the last time it was demonstrated at MLA in 1996. These include some of the Archive's most important features: fully functional search engines for both texts and images; Inote (a Java application developed at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities [IATH] at the University of Virginia to solve the problems of annotating and comparing images); and the ImageSizer (a second Java application that calibrates in inches or centimeters the size of any or all images on any monitor to allow the user to display them at actual, reduced, or enlarged sizes at will).

Viscomi also previewed a new wing of the site that is devoted to documentation and supplementary materials about the project. Available as the first entry on our main table of contents page from the URL above, this “About the Archive” wing includes a statement of Editorial Principles and Methodology, a technical summary of the Archive’s hardware, software, and data standards, a Frequently Asked Questions list, and an updated and expanded version of the article-length Plan of the Archive, providing additional detail about our intentions with regard to Blake’s non-illuminated works—and more. We believe these materials offer a comprehensive overview of what we think we are doing and why. [1]

The 60 slides of graphical screenshots making up Viscomi's MLA demonstration prevent it from being easily reproduced here. However, a version of it is now available as an online Tour, housed alongside the other materials called “About the Archive.” In what follows, the editors and technical editor of the Archive would like to respond to two papers delivered at the 1998 MLA meeting: Mary Lynn Johnson’s “The Iowa Blake Videodisc Project: A Cautionary History” and Andrew Cooper and Michael Simpson’s “The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake’s Eternal Hacking.”

The Origins of the Archive

Johnson’s is indeed a cautionary tale, an object lesson in the importance of nonproprietary standards that was learned the hard way. She warns us and others entering the brave new world of information technology that “project development is glamorous; routine maintenance is not,” that products may have an “unwritten expiration date,” and that the “learning curve” can be so steep that one slides right out of a scholarly field into a stack of computer manuals. While the William Blake Archive's internal email list (the focal point for discussion among the editors, the project staff, and the technical staff at IATH, with upwards of 4000 messages logged to date) proves that development is as frustrating as it is occasionally glamorous and exciting, we certainly agree that the construction of a scholarly resource as complex as ours requires intensive and long-term collaboration among the three editors, technical editor, and the staff of IATH to integrate the requisite textual, art-historical, critical, and technical expertise. As for the dangers of quick obsolescence and proprietary software, we were well aware of them from the start. Those dangers were our primary anxieties, and common sense suggests that we shouldn't forget them.

In 1991-93, while at work on two printed volumes in a new series published by the Blake Trust, Tate Gallery, and Princeton University Press, the editors came face to face with the limitations of even lavishly illustrated books for the kind of Blake edition we had envisioned and began to conceive the outlines of an electronic edition—we had yet to understand the features of the medium that would later move us to imagine an archival edition—that might overcome many of these limitations. With this in mind, at the urging of Jerome McGann we visited IATH in the summer of 1993 to see his Rossetti project and to meet with the staff of the Institute, including John Unsworth, the new director. After extensive discussions and demonstrations, we concluded not only that our concept of a rather primitive electronic edition was technically feasible but also that a scholarly resource far more ambitiously transformative was within the realm of possibility.

The technology that held the most promise was of course global network computing via the Internet and World Wide Web, which made it possible to conceive a long-distance professional collaboration and an “edition” of Blake that would overcome some of the limitations of conventional scholarly editing and in the process bridge the gap between the original works held in restricted collections, the often incomplete sets of expensive facsimiles in the rare-book rooms of some university libraries, and the indispensable but misleading printed editions on which virtually all “readers” had relied for their “Blake” since the late-Victorian Blake revival. But we were wary of false hopes. Like everyone else in the humanities, we had seen grand scholarly hopes—including the Iowa Blake Videodisc project—crucified on the cross of technological change and instant obsolescence. The PC-Mac wars were yet another reminder of the danger. The promise of “platform independence” and portability, however, represented by the codification of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, the source of the Web’s HTML and, soon, XML) and its scholarly counterpart in the coordinated standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI, 1987-) finally made it plausible to devote years of work to an electronic scholarly resource in the humanities. [2] The result could be stored on and displayed by any computer operating system (Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, etc.). Likewise, advances and some consensus in digital imaging standards (notably TIFF and JPEG) provided assurances that these data formats would not quickly fall from fashion.

But the project also forced us, as humanists, to confront our technological horizons: we could half-envision electronic remedies that we could not ourselves execute. IATH’s mission, we heard, was to help humanists use new information technology in carrying out their projects by supplying the requisite expertise and equipment at the research-and-development stage. Our preliminary discussions with the staff of IATH introduced us to an exotic new world of markup codes, servers and clients, the Web, and Java. But the primary consequence was the conception of a William Blake Archive, which would be a comprehensive but coherent array of electronic scholarly editions to be made available free of charge on the Web. We came to see the Blake project as a pacesetting instance of a fundamental shift in the ideas of “archive,” “catalogue,” and “edition” as both processes and products. Though “edition” and “archive” are the terms we have adopted, in fact we have envisioned a unique resource unlike any other currently available—a hybrid all-in-one edition, catalogue, database, and set of scholarly tools capable of taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by new information technology. We also came to believe that, given an elegant design and sufficiently powerful features—including an innovative way of searching for individual details in all the images in addition to the more conventional searches for specific texts—our project might help to set the pattern for serious art-historical and textual scholarship by electronic means at a key moment in their evolution. For a large international community of art historians and literary critics, among others, a “Blake Archive” could be a powerful reference tool, offering high-quality reproductions of an important body of work—much of it not previously reproduced, badly reproduced, or reproduced in rare volumes—and making that work freely accessible and useable in new ways that would improve interdisciplinary knowledge in areas where more and better knowledge was sorely needed.

A Visual Concordance

We would like to say some additional words about our image searching, since it is a topic of discussion in both the previous papers (and has attracted attention elsewhere). Early in our project planning, we decided that an image-search program was a requisite part of the Blake Archive—indeed, a unique and exciting feature which, in coordination with the Inote program developed at IATH, would enable us to create a visual concordance to Blake's oeuvre. We considered several alternative approaches to image searching, including computer-based pattern recognition (“machine vision”). This we quickly rejected for several reasons. Pattern recognition not only produces “hits” on negative spaces (e.g., an area of sky shaped like a sheep by surrounding clouds and landscape), but also it is fundamentally incompatible with motif recognition, our chief concern. Even if we envisioned some future pattern-recognition program with very sophisticated “fuzzy” logic, we could not imagine a program that would recognize, for example, every configuration of a sheep presented in Blake’s art: standing, sitting, lying down, facing in any direction, etc. Perhaps it is true that all Blake’s old men look alike, but his sheep (or trees or countless other motifs) do not. Further, even the best pattern-recognition program would sometimes have trouble distinguishing Blake's sheep from his dogs. [3]

As it became clear that what we wanted to use image searching to find—discriminable motifs—were already linguistically constructed, we realized that we should not resist a search mechanism filtered through language. The category “sheep”—what eighteenth-century philosophic grammarians called an “abstract substantive”—is a presence generated by language. If we wish to indicate just one such creature, a pointing gesture might serve as well as a word. But if we wish to think about “sheep” in general or discuss “sheep” in all their variety throughout Blake’s art, then we are already implicated in language. Further, our very perception of the world (including, of course, Blake’s pictures) is in part determined by these linguistically constructed categories. The linguistic nature of motif perception/conception necessarily preceded any deployment of a language-based search mechanism. Whatever distortions language could bring to the perception of Blake’s art had already occurred.

We moved then to consider another choice involving the words used to “tag” each image, which is what makes searching possible. The vocabulary might be controlled by the editors or it might be generated by users. The latter seemed to give users creative freedom in constructing their own search vocabulary, but it soon became clear that this would be merely an illusion, because searching for motifs would still have to be based on a “hidden” controlled vocabulary generated by the editors. These tag-terms would have to be supplemented by a vast array of synonyms so that user-generated terms would find matches with the words actually used, behind the scenes, for tagging. We could see ourselves devoting more time to guessing what users might key into the search page and to constructing a dictionary of synonyms than to actually tagging Blake’s images. A controlled vocabulary, fully revealed to the user, seemed the better option.

A brief glance at the search page will show that we have arranged our terms into a few large, non-hierarchical categories: figure (with several subsections), animal, vegetation, object, structure. Such categorization has a variety of ideological implications stretching from Aristotle through Linnaeus, but here and elsewhere our principle concern was with practical utility. At this point we should correct a misstatement by Johnson: she writes that searches across our different image categories—a search for plates containing both shepherd (Figure/Type) and sheep (Animal)—are not possible. This is incorrect. Users can search for up to nineteen different items at a time, selected from any combination of categories. The search buttons that appear after each category, which may have been confusing, are simply conveniences for the user; terms from all categories may be searched simultaneously.

In the Iowa Blake Videodisc project, images were described using key terms, with a maximum of 256 characters. Images in the William Blake Archive are described in far greater detail and the components of images are tagged as “characteristics,” the number of which is theoretically unrestricted. The characteristics are the search terms—the controlled vocabulary that appears in our menu-style lists. Though our search vocabulary is more extensive than that used for the Videodisc project, it is evolving in a similar way. Johnson notes that she and Grant made a “first pass through all the material, simply recording things as we saw them, before trying to winnow the descriptors down to the most important non-synonymous keywords.” In much the same way, we are currently making our own first pass, allowing the copies of each book to generate the terms. Once we have marked up at least one copy each of Blake’s illuminated books, we will begin a second pass with the aim of revising the vocabulary of terms. In other words, our search terms are still a work in progress, which helps to explain why “St. Paul's” was not among them (it is in Jerusalem, which is not yet online), and why the problems created by the occasional homonym and synonym have not yet been resolved. [4]

Some users have objected to the number of terms already listed. We hope to tighten our list in due course; but, in principle, we question the notion that there should not be “too many” terms. This is roughly equivalent to complaining that there are too many words in the Blake Concordance (the man really should not have used so many different words) or that there are too many words in the OED. The perception of “too many” usually comes not to someone actually initiating a search but to someone just glancing over the field of terms. Actual searchers are principally interested in finding the terms they are after; all others can be ignored. For some searchers, the term sought will not be found. In such cases, fuzzy logic and the logic of synonyms or near-synonyms should come into play—not in the computer, but in the searcher's head. A good rule of thumb in these circumstances is to think of a term at a slightly higher level of generality than the one initially sought. For example, if “ewe” is not present in our controlled vocabulary, try “sheep.” The tagging of motifs, and hence the generation of search terms, is always a balancing act among levels of specificity and generality. For best results, the skilled user of the search system will need to move among these levels.

The user can launch searches for virtually any combination of details in any or all of Blake’s images. The scope of the search can be limited in various ways. Like a text search, an image search produces a list of hits; choosing among them, the user is taken to textual descriptions of particular image details and then, choosing among those in turn, taken (via Inote) to plates zoomed to specific image-details displayed alongside the pertinent descriptions. At the zoomed image, all the functions of Inote are available should a user wish to explore the whole image in which the detail appears or to study any of the other descriptions associated with the image. These descriptions are, again, specific to the image being displayed; they are not general descriptions that average (or enumerate) the differences among plates across various copies (instances) of a work. This level of plate-specific description has never been attempted before. By opening more than one copy of their browser, users can also maintain multiple Inote sessions on their desktop concurrently, each showing a different plate as a result of the same (or a different) image search. Such flexibility, we believe, will ultimately justify the Archive's claim of providing a visual concordance to Blake.

Blake in the 21^st Century

At the heart of Johnson's paper is the question of whether electronic resources such as the William Blake Archive will be useful and useable in the next millennium. We cannot be certain, of course, but we have given more than a little thought to the issue. Both TIFF and JPEG (the Archive's primary image-data formats) are what are known as non-proprietary data standards, and thus sheltered from the vicissitudes of particular hardware and software implementations. JPEG is also recognized by the International Standards Organization (ISO). We have already noted (above) the centrality of SGML, also an ISO standard, for encoding all textual materials in the Archive. Non-proprietary standards are not a magic bullet, but they do provide the comfort of knowing that a community of knowledgeable people is committed to keeping the standard viable and to ensuring that new and improved data standards retain some measure of continuity by allowing for reliable migration from existing formats and platforms. XML, for example, which some see as the heir-apparent of SGML, was developed by many of the same people who were instrumental in the codification of the Text Encoding Initiative. The compatibility issues are minimal. [5]

We have also thought long and hard about what reproductive source would be most suitable for our digital images. The images in the Iowa Blake Videodisc project were scanned from 2”x2” slides. Our images are scanned electronically in 24-bit color at 300 dots per inch (dpi) from newly shot, first-generation 4”x5” and 8”x10” color transparencies with color bars and gray scales—only occasionally, for very small objects, from slides. [6] Once digitized (in uncompressed TIFF format in a file that serves as the archival master for permanent storage), each raw image file is color corrected against the transparencies—which are themselves checked against the originals on the same color corrected light box—by one of the editors on professional equipment designed and calibrated for that purpose. The Archive's Object View pages provide reproductions at 100 dpi compressed in JPEG format. That resolution is fine enough for most purposes and yields data files of modest size that facilitate downloading and movement from image to image. The enlargement (from the enlargement button at the bottom of every Object View page) is a 300 dpi JPEG. The enlargement yields superb detail for close inspection of printing and coloring. Our standards of reproduction are, in short, as high as we believe they can be, given the various technical and financial limitations from which no project can entirely free itself. We are convinced, however, that these limitations have not compromised the quality and accuracy of the digital images available to all in the Archive.

But reproductions can never be perfect, and our images are not intended to be “archival” in the sense sometimes intended—virtual copies that might stand in for destroyed originals. We recognize that, if we are going to contribute to the preservation of fragile originals that are easily damaged by handling, we must supply reproductions that are reliable enough for scholars to depend upon in their research. Hence our benchmarks 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 almost always more faithful to the originals in scale, color, and detail than the best photomechanical (printed) images, including the original Blake Trust facsimiles, which were produced through a combination of collotype and hand-painting through stencils. The Archive's images create no visual “boundaries” between colors (the result of using stencils), and we have achieved greater color fidelity in some notable instances—for example, several plates in the Blake Trust’s facsimile of The Book of Urizen copy G have a reddish hue not found in the originals. In this respect, the images in the Archive are truer to the tonality of the originals.

This brings us to two key questions that many have asked about large-scale electronic projects such as ours, questions that Johnson wisely and fairly poses: “How many people are likely ever to use your fully developed program?” and “Will the product you envision . . . allow them to accomplish something otherwise impossible?” We cannot yet answer Johnson's first question fully, though on a typical day the Archive's main table of contents page receives upwards of 400 user hits. The fact that the Archive is free on the Web should optimize its chances of finding a reasonably large and diverse audience .We do know, however, that we do not want to sacrifice scholarly depth even if only a relatively small segment of our users will take advantage of the Archive's full range of features. But the answer to Johnson's second question is yes. By incorporating as much of Blake's pictorial and literary canon as possible, much of it never before reproduced—with both images and texts organized, interlinked, and searchable in ways that only hypermedia systems will allow—the Archive can for the first time give scholars and students access to the major intersections between the illuminated books and Blake's other creative and commercial works. That is to say, by exploiting new information technology to deliver the historical, technical, and aesthetic contexts necessary to study Blake as printmaker, painter, and poet, the Archive attempts to encourage a deeper, more responsible understanding of his aims and methods, which have been often misunderstood and misrepresented.

But we should also say that the importance of the Archive ultimately lies with new generations of scholars and students. We are endeavoring to provide the tools and the resources, but it will be up to others to make loading the Archive in a browser window as intuitive as opening their copy of the Erdman or Keynes edition. In time we hope to see the publication of articles or even books that use the Archive and its materials as primary sources of reference. This will take time, though how much time we cannot predict.

Artifacts and Artifice

We now turn to Andrew Cooper and Michael Simpson's paper, which moves us from the practicalities of constructing a sustainable electronic environment for the study of Blake to what we might call, for convenience, more “theoretical” topics. Yet ultimately Cooper and Simpson are asking the question most often asked by teachers of Blake: how do you read Blake? Mary Lynn Johnson starts with the same premises we start with: the originals are very rare, widely dispersed, and often inaccessible even to scholars; the originals are not going to make their way into the classroom; the reproductions that are (like the Dover reproductions of Blake Trust reproductions) are unsatisfactory. To read Blake in the original is the ideal, but few of us are going to have this experience—hence the need for the Blake Trust series of facsimile reproductions, the Iowa Blake Videodisc Project, and the William Blake Archive. Of course, one could argue that preferring the original over the digital is merely to fetishize an aura of materiality. Cooper and Simpson’s insistence on the transcendent value of the original, though, is not based on its materiality but on the theory that reading original illuminated prints is “perspectival,” and that perspectival reading is thwarted by the virtual.

Cooper and Simpson's claims about both the real and the virtual Blake, as well as their claims about computers in general and the intentions of the Archive’s editors in particular, need to be reexamined. They seem to take our project almost too seriously, or too religiously and apocalyptically, imputing motives that the editors do not have. They base their view on what they take to be Blake's own ideology of transcendent “vision” and find that the Archive does not achieve the suitable utopia of freedom from the material world. Some of what they argue is simply incorrect, stemming from basic misapprehensions of the Archive's editorial objectives, or of Blake's illuminated printing techniques, or of computers as technologies and media. Other aspects of their argument seem to arise from more nebulous convictions expressed in rhetorical flourishes like their opening gambit regarding the Archive's “unlawful” marriage to Bill Gates and Microsoft (see our discussion of non-proprietary data standards in response to Johnson, above).

To begin, Cooper and Simpson's discussion of Blake’s mode of production and the nature of the work produced is historically and technically inaccurate. The illuminated plates are not “relief etch engravings”; they are relief etchings written and drawn with pens, brushes, and an acid resistant ink in a manner nearly as autographic as writing and drawing. It was not a “labor intensive process,” nor were relief plates subject to “deliberately inefficient printing methods.” The copper plates were printed on the machine designed for them, the rolling press, which may appear “inefficient” relative to the platen press, but to compare Blake's methods to those of letterpress printing is to misunderstand completely the very nature of his illuminated books. The objective was not to produce hundreds of copies of his books, but, as Blake said, to secure a “great reputation as an Artist” (E 771). Multiple copies of illuminated works could reach a larger audience than could watercolor designs and other unique works on paper.

However the illuminated prints were produced, Cooper and Simpson speak as though they can be experienced as Blake intended, as they left “the printing house of hell.” But they cannot. The leaves Blake and his wife Catherine stabbed, wrapped in blue paper, and bound with string have, since leaving their hands, been bound in leather bindings, often trimmed and edges gilded, or extracted from 19th-century bindings and placed in separate mats. Cooper and Simpson describe in detail the effect of reading “A Cradle Song.” Given their distaste for reproductions, we assume that their comments are based on a careful study of an original impression. But which copy? Or, if they have descended to studying mere reproductions, which ones? Just where are they getting their image? Is it, too, not delivered by medium? If a book, did they not pay for it? Is it not printed by mechanical means on paper? Is it an inexpensive or expensive facsimile? In color or black and white? Is the image reproduced to size or larger or smaller? On glossy paper or on matte? With a coarse or a fine halftone screen? At 1280 x 870 dpi or 800 x 600 dpi? In 256 or millions of colors? These are material questions about material media. They cannot be brushed aside arbitrarily.

Cooper and Simpson state that “reading words and pictures is a physical activity, and inescapably perspectival” and that Blake’s texts appear “slightly recessed within the ornamental vegetation that frames them, each to them thus portraying a further, smaller window-screen nested recursively in the larger plane of text.” If they mean that illuminated texts appear behind the vegetation framing them either because that is the nature of how words and images are perceived when combined, or because Blake created the illusion of recessed text, then print reproductions ought to provide the same kind of experience . We suspect, however, that they mean “recessed” literally, as a physical property of the original illuminated print. True, a digital image cannot present illuminated text nested within its ornamental frame, but then neither can Blake’s illuminated prints. The text and the ornament around it are on the same relief surface of the plate and are pressed equally into the paper with a pressure generally insufficient to produce noticeable embossments. The “recession” produced by Blake's press is usually no greater than that produced in letterpress printing, which is why Blake was able to print on both sides of the paper. Plates color printed from both relief and recessed surfaces were often printed with more pressure than those printed solely in relief, but “A Cradle Song” was never color printed. Posthumous impressions were routinely printed with more force than Blake himself used, but these impressions are noticeably different from Blake’s in large part because of this pressure. Are they more “Blakean” as a result? Cooper and Simpson are not “reading” these recessed areas; instead they are assuming—in theory only—that these recessions exist when in fact they are rarely apparent or only seen in raking light.

Cooper and Simpson do not acknowledge hands as part of the reading experience, only eyes—eyes scanning supposedly overtly multileveled planes of text and design. “Of course, viewing Blake’s works cyber-optically isn’t necessarily any more constraining than viewing them through the ‘vegetable glass’ of nature herself.” What might this sentence mean? It concludes a paragraph accusing the “Lockean sight organ” of restraining whatever it sees—including, of course, original illuminated prints. For Cooper and Simpson, reproduction—digital or print—is not the thing itself, but then neither is the thing, since viewing it through the “vegetable glass” of nature is always constricting, and “no amount of help can in itself realize a visionary response” in the reader to Blake’s ideas. It appears that the Blake experienced by the authors is exquisitely private and internal, inscribed directly “within the ‘infinite’ brain of the perceiver.” In that case we are dealing not merely with the concepts of transparent media that point to something transcendent and opaque media that are self-reflexive, but with a kind of Platonic transcendence in which, as Shelley noted, the poem exists in the mind of its creator, and any reception of it by another requires a medium, which inherently distorts the original idea. Cooper and Simpson have an odd way of privileging the materiality of illuminated prints only to undercut the significance of that materiality. What does it matter, on their terms, that the digital image is flat, displayed within a software interface, and imprisoned by the Archive’s “own uniform ‘visual syntax’” if the reader is sufficiently Blakean? (It is an interesting assumption—unargued in the essay, and a species of author-worship—that in order to study Blake, you must be Blakean.) [7]

The Materiality of Virtual Media

Throughout their essay, Cooper and Simpson derive considerable rhetorical momentum from the notion that the Archive rests upon a naive and unseemly embrace of information technology, “the crystalline virtue of the virtual.” Yet their own analysis seems blissfully unfettered by much in the way of hands-on experience with humanities computing and the development of scholarly electronic resources. For example, in describing some of the apparent seductions of electronic editing, they claim that “Immense volumes of data can be steered into baroque juxtapositions.” At the Blake Archive, we know that behind such casual statements lie two years of intensive testing and development, during which we literally rebuilt a commercial search engine from the ground up. In the process, the editors and project staff collided head-on with many of the material limitations of the medium and its attendant conventions such as SGML encoding. Some of these limitations persist to this day in the Archive's structure, interface, and search logics. Cooper and Simpson are rightly skeptical of “rhetorics of technological freedom” in the broadest social and economic sense—they remind us that software and machines are products built by people—but their writing reveals that they are themselves susceptible to these very same rhetorics of technological freedom at the applied computational level.

They charge us, for example, with “naturalizing” the performative elements of Blake's writing and art by imposing on them a “uniform ‘visual syntax’” comprising the “pixellated computer screen” and “at a higher level of abstraction, the predetermined search categories of the Archive.” Cooper and Simpson then align these traces of digital artifice with the commercial reproductive engraving techniques of Blake's own day, which he practiced quite competently, though he objected, especially late in his career, to their technological constraints. The suggestion is that the Archive naively betrays its own Blakean legacy (“the Archive's self-appointed role as merely an instrument of Blakean vision”). Bracketing the question of whether the Archive is sufficiently Blakean, we again note the tendency in Cooper and Simpson's thinking to naturalize the digital medium by homogenizing such material variables as hardware, software, data standards, platform, and interface. Yet these are precisely the variables that have come to define our experiences with the medium in the day to day work of building the Archive.

We are all keenly aware, for example, that JPEG compression algorithms are in their own way every bit as artificial as the engraving techniques of Blake's contemporaries. Indeed, ironically, we have discovered that current implementations of JPEG are not well suited to the dense line-networks characteristic of engravings, and we've had to experiment to overcome optical distortions introduced by image processing. (Let us add that compensating for those distortions is itself an activity that is carried out within a self-conscious horizon of editorial practice rather than as a vain attempt to naturalize the presentation of the image.) Specialists in the interactions of human beings with computers have long identified today's “pixellated computer screen” as the weak link at the interface between human and virtual environments; but that understanding doesn't preclude us, as scholars, from achieving a certain level of control over the “cyber-optics” of the screen. As noted above, we color-correct our images on high-end professionally calibrated monitors using precise settings, and we then provide those same settings to our users so that they can reproduce the conditions under which the images were corrected. But whereas Cooper and Simpson might be tempted to dismiss “high-end professionally calibrated” or “precise settings” as fetishizing language, we use it to indicate the extent to which we have been able to demystify the abstractions implicit in their own lapsarian phrase, “pixellated computer screen,” by dealing with them editorially.

As for the “uniform ‘visual syntax’” (earlier termed “neo-Kantian” by Cooper and Simpson) of our image searching apparatus, once again, we find ourselves confronting certain computational limitations. As we also stated above, present-day image-retrieval systems based on machine-vision and pattern-matching procedures are simply not adequate to the task of telling tigers from lambs, let alone shepherds from philosophers or virgins from nymphs. We point this out to underscore the extent to which Cooper’s and Simpson's critique repeatedly misses its mark through a lack of the understanding and appreciation for the medium that comes with sustained practical experience. (A far more interesting critique of image-searching might be directed at the way even pattern-matching routines are linguistically based, since, like all computational routines, they must be written as machine-readable code.) In the end, the notion that “in the virtual world in general, as in the Blake Archive in microcosm, we can have whatever and as much as we desire,” scorned by Cooper and Simpson at its most vulgar socio-economic level, is reintroduced and implicitly valorized through their inability to discuss the medium at any level beyond empty reifications of “the cyber” and “the virtual.”

Artifacts and Access

Cooper and Simpson are most critical of our “Welcome Page.” They say that exchanging their “natural rights” for “civil rights” at the door of the Archive “circumscribes” their “freedom,” and that agreeing with the copyright conditions stipulated there forces them into a “Faustian bargain.” They refer unhappily to the “content of the Archive” as “private property” and note that the Archive as a whole is “copyrighted to the editors.”

Are Cooper and Simpson then implying that they (and other users) have a “natural right” to download and republish any image they find, and that we are restricting them by asking them instead to abide by the copyright and fair use laws? Have they ever read a book that warns that its text and images are not to be reproduced in any other medium without written permission of the publisher? Is the editors' copyright on the Archive different from Erdman's or Keynes' copyrights on their printed editions? Have Cooper and Simpson ever copyrighted one of their own books or articles? Or should copyright somehow not apply when they access images in the Archive just because the object in question comes from the heady reaches of “cyberspace.” (Here again we see Cooper and Simpson tacitly endorsing the myths of virtual transcendence that they seek to debunk by reference to computer chips manufactured in Malaysia.) Even more to the point, have Cooper and Simpson ever tested their theories about access to artifacts by petitioning for entry into a real archive, where they must fill out copious application forms, present identification cards and scholarly credentials or testimonials, sign themselves in (and out), and work, with pencil only and no food or drink, under the curator's watchful eye?

Access is always a matter of choosing among actual alternatives. Cooper and Simpson dodge the hard facts of legal restrictions, museum and library budgets, and project funding and instead blame the Blake Archive for buying into these restrictions and funding mechanisms. But they stop short of specifying what alternative means of access to Blake's works they would prefer, or, given their objections to present laws and customs, what social order they prefer to this one. A list of viable alternatives would give their readers something to think about. But instead, they imply that the only legitimate, admirable, politically progressive course of action is one that doesn't participate in any market, doesn't involve money, and doesn't admit the concept of property. Should the editors have waited until such a social order prevails to create an electronic archive? To take this line seems to us at best wishful thinking and at worst intellectually irresponsible. It assumes, among much else, that the Archive's technical staff and graduate assistants should work without pay; that purity of principle on intellectual grounds is preferable to accessibility for the general user; and that museums and libraries whose existence is predicated on the uniqueness of their collections should give everyone everything for free. Only someone who has never tried to deal with any of these issues could hold such beliefs. [8]

The William Blake Archive is a free site, open to all. We impose no access charges, we collect no subscription fees. Copyright may seem editorially frivolous, but it follows directly from our emphasis on physical objects, which raise property issues that could be largely ignored by Blake's literary editors when dealing with a “writer” long dead but cannot be ignored by anyone who wants to reproduce the objects—the prints, paintings, and manuscripts. The prominence of material objects in our schema inevitably means that our daily editorial reality involves us in dealings with the owners of these objects for permissions and photography. The success of the project depends heavily on our ability to provide an electronic environment where museums and collectors feel that their images are both well displayed and safe. To meet these needs we have gone to some lengths to investigate the laws governing copyright and to offer state-of-the-art protection, including digital watermarking. Considering the volatile state of international electronic copyright, controversies over fair-use policies, and owners' fears of illicit copying, we have come to regard our copyright policy as a key part of our editorial policy—and so it is that all users must indicate explicit agreement with the conditions of use, including copyright restrictions, that we stipulate on our home page. On the other hand, we make every effort to smooth the way for users who want to obtain permission to reproduce one of the Archive's images in the correct manner: every reproduction is linked to a detailed copyright notice (the link is the copyright symbol beneath the image). Additional copyright information is displayed via the Info button of the ImageSizer applet beneath each image. The information necessary for contacting all the contributing institutions is also available.

Incidentally, one of Cooper and Simpson's major unstated assumptions is that Blake somehow exempted himself from the unpleasant realities of labor and commerce. But in fact he sold his works for real cash money that he accepted. Over a lifetime he raised his prices. He always bought copper and paper and pigments—from where? Who made them? Well-paid unionized workers? Who slaved over the copper ore and then over the molten metal? Who gathered the material for exotic pigments? Who or what gave up its hair for Blake's brushes? Is the question or the answer substantially different from the one Cooper and Simpson ask about our copyright statements or our (or their, or your) computer chips? We can lament all we want, but we can't exempt Blake, who knowingly made his living as an artist—that is, whenever he could get people to buy, he readily sold. [9]

On Erdman's Edition(s)

The full extent of Cooper and Simpson’s misreading of the Archive can be gauged by their claims that it is based on an edition of Erdman. “Even as it is explicitly based on Erdman’s edition, the Archive claims implicitly to supersede it. First, there is the logical issue of the Archive’s very existence: if it does not, in some sense supersede the book, what is it for?” In fact the Blake Archive is not based on Erdman, as we have clearly stated in the Plan of the Archive (publicly available on the site since January, 1996; revised 1999). There, and repeatedly in most of our updates, we have explained that we prepare “diplomatic” texts of the specific copies reproduced. 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 comprehensive edition, an approximation of his page layout (within the limitations of our medium). 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. Cooper and Simpson also suggest that the Archive is controlled in some manner by “the prosaic metacommentary of Erdman's text . . . nested within the Archive.” We are uncertain what this means. As noted, our transcriptions resemble Erdman's only insofar as we, too, transpose Blake's handwritten words into typographic characters. If “Erdman's text” refers instead to his highly interpretive descriptions of the designs from the illuminated books in The Illuminated Blake, then we should point out that our descriptions of these designs and their component motifs are not based on Erdman's work in any way. They are based on our own perceptions of Blake's images. But perhaps the “prosaic metacommentary” we share with Erdman is some general ideology or episteme rather than specific textual/contextual engagements. Of that we are probably guilty, along with Cooper and Simpson.

Again—beyond their discussions of Blake's printing techniques and the artifice of electronic images, the Archive's Welcome page, or the Erdman edition—Cooper and Simpson impute to the William Blake Archive a whole set of ideas, claims, and affiliations that its editors have nowhere asserted. Somehow the electronic medium itself, not how we use it specifically, beckons toward or implies transcendence to Cooper and Simpson—first, transcendence of law, then of any social matrix, ultimately of matter. The last paragraph is particularly intriguing: “. . . Blake's work insists that it has never been able to transcend the minute particulars of its own moment. The Archive's effort to make Blake's work do otherwise . . . .” It strikes us as very odd to hear that, in creating the Archive, we could imagine ourselves to be transcending minute particulars (pixels, for example). To the contrary: we certainly don't think we are trying to reach a metaphysical goal that Blake himself never could. Here and elsewhere, however, Cooper and Simpson deal in sophisticated innuendo and evasion while saying little of practical consequence. If we in the humanities are to engage with new media responsibly—both practically and theoretically—we must be prepared to do so with the same level of care, attention, and rigor we accord to more traditional kinds of scholarship.

Some Concluding Remarks

Cooper and Simpson write: “When it comes to Blake, we need all the technical assistance we can get—not only criticism and editing but the latest reproduction technology as well. Yet, no amount of help can in itself realize a visionary response to Blake’s question: ‘how do you know but ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?” On this we can all agree. The Archive contains much material for the study of Blake; at what level of vision, or Vision, you meet it is your own business. Our principles, our methods, and our claims about their advantages are certainly not beyond criticism. We have tried to be as explicit about these as possible, both here and in the far more extensive materials “About the Archive” on the site itself.

Although the William Blake Archive is constructed on an 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 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 is full of daily debates over minute editorial issues, we had no difficulty agreeing that we should incorporate 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. His text has become part of the history of Blake scholarship and hence part of what “Blake” has become in the late-twentieth century as a textual, aesthetic, and social phenomenon. 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.

Those of us at work on the William Blake Archive are neither “cyber-boosters” nor “cyber-poopers,” just scholars with the good fortune to be operating in a medium that presents some alternatives to past modes of academic production and communication. But we are also all scholars whose professional work beyond the Archive is readily recognizable as “media studies” in the broadest sense. The intellectual foundations of that work, combined with our daily immersion in technical matters of the kind we have described—alternatively exciting, tedious, and frustrating—very early on disabused us of any notion that the computer was not itself an instrument of technological artifice. We hope what we have said here reaches those who might have imagined that we ever imagined otherwise.