Over the course of two centuries, respect for the prints, paintings, and poems of William Blake (1757-1827) has increased to a degree that would have astonished his contemporaries. Today both his poetry and visual art in several media are admired by a global audience. In the broadest terms, the William Blake Archive is a contemporary response to the needs of this dispersed and various audience of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections where Blake's original works are currently held.
A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996 (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake), the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors, currently eight American and British institutions and a major private collector, have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees. At this writing the Archive contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 27 copies of 16 of Blake's 19 illuminated works in the context of full, up-to-date bibliographic information about each image, scrupulous "diplomatic" transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. By June 1999, the Archive will contain one copy of all the illuminated books, including the longest, Jerusalem (100 plates), and multiple copies of several, along with a searchable new electronic version of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, the standard printed edition for reference.
Through intensive collaboration between the editors and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the Archive has been able to achieve exceptionally high standards of site construction, digital reproduction, and electronic editing that are, we believe, models of their kind. Advanced principles of design allow the Blake Archive to integrate editions, catalogues, databases, and scholarly tools into one electronic archival resource. We supply reproductions that are more accurate in color, detail, and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition has provided. We have applied equally high standards in supplying a wealth of contextual information, which includes full and accurate bibliographical details and meticulous descriptions of the content of each image. Finally, users of the Archive can attain a new degree of access to these works through the combination of powerful text-searching and (for the first time in any medium) advanced image-searching tools that are made possible by the editors' controlled vocabulary, detailed image descriptions, and innovative software, including two custom-designed Java applets. Although we have designed the Archive to serve scholars and general public within the limits of existing systems, we have built in considerable allowance for future improvements in hardware and software.
The first phase of development, underwritten by the Getty Grant Program with help from other sponsors, concentrated on the fundamentals of site design and the incorporation of a group of Blake's illuminated books selected on sound historical principles drawn from recent revisionist scholarship. In the second phase (1999-2002), we intend to complete the design work, incorporate additional illuminated books, and add non-illuminated materials--paintings, drawings, original and reproductive prints, manuscripts, and rare or unique typographic works&emdash;that both expand the core coherently and exemplify the full range of Blake's achievement.
Doing so will yield an augmented "Blake" considerably larger than the one most familiar to students and scholars. Without sacrificing the Blake of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the extended archive will reveal the painter-printmaker whose illuminated books emerged from the materials, work routines, and imagery of eighteenth-century history painting, watercolor drawing, and graphic arts, as well as from the literary routines of Milton, the Bible, Swedenborg, and Boehme, which students of Blake have more often investigated. Commercial illustrations, for example, can bring into focus a major convergence between Blake's illuminated book Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and his engravings to J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (etched 1791). Even the familiar profile of a poet-Blake can be deepened by the inclusion of Blake's extensive group of literary illustrations, such as those to Milton's poems, which should be seen in connection with Blake's 50-plate illuminated book Milton.
By the end of the period 1999-2002, the Archive will have doubled in size to approximately 3000 images, about 2/3 from the illuminated books, the remaining 1/3 in other media. This extended Archive aims to set a new standard of accessibility to a vast array of visual and textual materials that are central to an adequate grasp of the British art and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
We are hoping, of course, that the Archive, once extended to encompass the full range of Blake's work, will ultimately set a new standard of accessibility to a vast collection of visual and textual materials that are central to an adequate grasp of the art and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But we have also come 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 fallen back on, 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.
The collaborative procedures we have begun to develop, which we hope will become useful prototypes of "distance editing," depend upon the intensive day-to-day teamwork among the three editors and the staff of IATH to integrate the textual, art-historical, critical, and technical expertise necessary for the construction of a scholarly resource as complex as this one. We see the products of our collaboration as similarly prototypical: in facing new technical and editorial challenges, the Blake project will leave future archivers, editors, and cataloguers the benefits of new tools. The Document Type Definition (DTD) developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has become the default standard for encoded electronic texts. We believe that its standard counterpart for encoded electronic images may well turn out to be the evolving Blake Archive DTD. In this image-oriented non-TEI DTD--an art historian's DTD if you will--we are constructing the most comprehensive applied product of its kind, one robust and flexible enough to be readily adapted to the needs of many other projects. In addition, software developed by IATH, such as our Java applets Inote and ImageSizer, will be adaptable to virtually any project in which images are important.
Because the signal advantage of electronic editing and cataloguing is the open-endedness that makes it possible to add materials, correct errors, incorporate new discoveries, and construct new relationships, we have believed from the first that our principal objective-- the most significant contribution we can hope to make--should be the creation of a sound and durable foundation for decades of future scholarship. Since 1995, when the Getty Grant Program underwrote the initial phase of our project, we have worked to shape the foundations of the Archive in strict accordance with our original ideals and priorities.
William Blake Archive
Narrative
1. significance
2. history
4. plan of work
Appendix I: Advisory Board
Appendix II: Illuminated Books in the Blake Archive
Appendix III: Current Contributors to the Blake Archive
Appendix IV: Blake Archive: A Technical Summary
Appendix V: Extract from Thread Index, blake-proj
Appendix VI: An Image Production Record
Appendix VII: SGML Markup, Songs Copy Z, pl. 24
Appendix VIII: Pages from the Blake Archive
The William Blake Archive, an archive of electronic editions available free as a site on the World Wide Web (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake), first opened to the public in 1996 with simple reproductions from two of Blake's early "illuminated books" in "illuminated printing," as he labeled them. The reproductions were lightly encoded (in HTML only), accompanied by little contextual information, with no search capabilities. At this writing (August 1998) the Archive contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 27 copies of 16 of Blake's 19 illuminated works in the context of full, up-to-date bibliographic information about each image, intricate transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. By June 1999, the Archive will contain one copy of all the illuminated books, including the longest, Jerusalem (100 plates), and multiple copies of several.
Meanwhile, the roster of major contributors has grown from one to nine: the Library of Congress (now a sponsor) has been joined by the Huntington Library and Art Galleries, the Essick Collection, the New York Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Yale Center for British Art, the Glasgow University Library, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. We have opened discussions with other major domestic and foreign collections. Our success to date in obtaining the confidence and good will of owners has reassured us that a rather vast undertaking such as ours is possible at the present time. As it is difficult to know whether present opportunities will last indefinitely, we are determined to press forward now. Further acknowledgement of the significance of the Blake Archive as a progressive scholarly and pedagogical enterprise has come from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, which first perceived the value of undertaking such a challenging project, and from the Getty Grant Program, which provided major funding for the first phase of design and construction, with additional grants from the Essick Foundation, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. Hardware and software contributions have come from Sun Microsystems and Inso Corporation.
Over the course of two centuries, respect for the prints, paintings, and poems of William Blake (1757-1827) has increased to a degree that would have astonished his contemporaries. Now, more than a century since the "Blake revival" was inaugurated by a small group of late-Victorian writers and artists, he is universally regarded as a seminal visual and literary artist. His poems and pictures are known and studied worldwide by a vast audience of scholars, students, and general public. In addition to the major exhibitions that can be expected at regular intervals in the US and Britain, there have been, for example, large shows in Madrid and Tokyo in this decade. Blake's poetry has been translated into many languages, his pictures are frequently reproduced, and both his words and pictures maintain a cultural currency that is exceedingly rare for long-dead artists. The published scholarship on Blake is similarly global: annual checklists of Blake scholarship always include numerous books and articles by an international community of authors.
In the broadest terms, the Blake Archive is a contemporary response to the needs of this dispersed and various audience of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections where Blake's original works are currently held. Both the audience and the collections, institutions, and curators on which it depends share a strong interest in the accessibility and the preservation of Blake's works. The Blake Archive attempts to serve both sets of needs at once by providing free access to its Web site, where access to Blake's works is possible to a degree heretofore impossible. Whether our users' inquiries are inspired by scholarly research, casual interest, term papers, or simple love of imaginative art and writing, no other resource can match the accessibility, the power, or the range made possible by the archiving, searching, and viewing options at our Web site.
But we have designed the site primarily with scholars in mind. For them we believe that the Archive will soon become not merely useful but indispensable--as a handy reference, a point of departure, or a site of sustained research. The Archive has adhered to exceptionally high standards of site construction, digital reproduction, and electronic editing that are, we believe, models of their kind. They make it possible for the Archive to deliver reproductions that are more accurate in color, detail, and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition has provided. We have applied equally high standards in supplying a wealth of contextual information, which includes full and accurate bibliographical details and meticulous descriptions of the content of each image. Finally, users of the Archive can attain a new degree of access to these works through the combination of powerful text-searching and (for the first time in any medium) advanced image-searching tools that are made possible by the editors' detailed image descriptions and innovative software. Although we have designed the Archive to serve scholars and general public within the limits of existing systems, we have built in considerable allowance for future improvements in hardware and software.
The Archive had its origins in the fortunate confluence of four phenomena during one brief span of time in the early 1990s: the completion of a broad base of mature 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 undertakings such as ours; and, finally, the creation of an organization specifically charged with the task of 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.
The scholarship: Despite decades of scholarship, the knowledge of Blake's work was fragmentary and unsystematic until the final quarter of this century, partly because the upturn in his reputation came so long after his death but largely because the study of Blake has often split into distinct institutional compartments devoted to the study of art on the one hand and literature very much on the other hand. Not that literary critics and art historians cannot talk to each other, but they operate with different assumptions and procedures even when they happen to be--as they rarely are but in this case were--operating on the very same original materials. The resulting lack of coordination delayed the construction of the standard tools of reference and reproduction that represent what we know about Blake, a printmaker and painter who was also an author.
But by the late 1980s the standard points of reference were finally in place: reliable printed editions of the poetry, prose, and letters (Bentley 1978, Erdman 1982); excellent if rare and expensive facsimiles of one (but only one) of each of Blake's "illuminated books" (the Blake Trust-Trianon Press facsimiles, 1951-1976); documentary records of the life (Bentley 1969, 1988); and good catalogues of the major categories of Blake's oeuvre, including the drawings and paintings (Butlin 1981), illuminated books and secondary criticism (Bentley 1977, 1995), complete graphic works (Bindman 1978), separate plates (Essick 1983), and commercial engravings (Essick 1991), augmented by numerous subsidiary catalogues that fill out the picture of Blake's multifaceted productive life. However, the crucial piece of this foundation that concerned Blake's illuminated books was weakened by errors that had generated a history of false inference and an essentially false overall picture. In 1993, building on the work of Robert Essick and G. E. Bentley, Jr. but reassessing the fundamental evidence, Joseph Viscomi's Blake and the Idea of the Book redrew the map of Blake's productions in his most famous and difficult medium. The stage was thereby set for a new phase of radical editorial revision--but revision of a kind that the print medium could not easily accommodate.
The technology: The technology that held the most promise in such a case 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 transcend the limitations of conventional scholarly editing and in the process render irrelevant the gap between the original works in restricted collections, the incomplete sets of expensive facsimiles in the rare-book rooms of some large university libraries, and the indispensable but highly misleading printed editions on which virtually all "readers" had relied for their "Blake" since the late-Victorian Blake revival.
The encoding system: But we were wary of false hopes. Like everyone else in the humanities, we had seen grand scholarly hopes crucified on the cross of technological change and instant obsolescence. Not long before we began thinking seriously about the uses of digital technology, an unanticipated change in videodisk technology had pulled the rug out from under an ambitious scheme to reproduce a substantial selection of Blake's images at the University of Iowa. The PC-Mac wars were another reminder of the danger. But the promise of "platform independence" and portability 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.
The institutional base: But the promise of closing the editorial gap forced us, as humanists, to face the technological gap: we could half-envision electronic remedies that we could not execute. At that point, in 1993, we crossed paths with the then-new (and still unique) Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (1992-). 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 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 would 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, the Blake Archive would be a powerful reference tool, offering high-quality reproductions of an important body of work--much of it previously unreproduced, badly reproduced, or reproduced in rare volumes--and making that work accessible and useable in new ways that would improve interdisciplinary knowledge in areas where more and better knowledge was sorely needed.
By incorporating as much of Blake's pictorial and literary canon as possible--with both images and texts organized, interlinked, and searchable in ways that only hypermedia systems will allow--the Archive would 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 would encourage a deeper, more responsible understanding of his aims and methods, which have been regularly misunderstood and misrepresented.
The concrete results would be
Both products would be designed for use by a broad audience of scholars and students in studies, classrooms, and museums. Portability makes disks a popular medium in classrooms and on desktop computers. But for scholars doing sustained original research, there is no adequate substitute for global access to a platform-independent William Blake Archive published on the Web.
Thus all along our fundamental aim has been to construct a unified international public resource out of highly disparate and dispersed original materials to which access is ordinarily limited by institutional and other restrictions and by the sheer cost and difficulty of travel. As a public resource, the Blake Archive would be maintained free and open to all those who have access to the Web anywhere. We hoped we could persuade major collectors and collections of Blake material to agree to contribute their works to the Archive in precisely that spirit, especially considering that very few works by Blake are on permanent exhibition due to concern about the effects of handling and excessive exposure to light. Several major institutional collections have severely limited even scholars' access to the fragile originals. This includes at least two of our contributors, the Huntington and the Fitzwilliam. Even registered scholarly readers at the Huntington, for example, must get special permission from the Associate Curator of Early Printed Books to see a single illuminated book. Both institutions recently disbound and/or rebound several illuminated books in an attempt to improve preservation. Our contribution to these attempts at preservation is very direct: by making available searchable and sizeable images of the highest quality, we can provide access without compromising preservation in any way. Institutions that contribute to the Archive can continue to provide scholars and public full access to these treasures while at the same time taking all necessary measures to preserve the originals. (As a curator wrote recently: "I look forward to viewing [his institution's illuminated books]. You will probably know that we have now made a link from our web pages to the Blake Archive so that users can easily view our copies rather than over-tax the originals. With a fast-enough machine they come up almost instantaneously.")
Once archived digitally, structured and tagged (indexed for retrieval in SGML, adapted to the purpose), annotated with detailed descriptions, and orchestrated with a powerful search engine (in this case DynaWeb software), the images in the Archive could be examined like ordinary color reproductions. But they could also be searched alongside the texts, enlarged, computer enhanced, juxtaposed in numerous combinations, and otherwise manipulated to investigate features (such as the etched basis of the designs and texts) that have heretofore been imperceptible without close first-hand scrutiny of the original works, which are housed in international collections at widely separated locations. For example, the information necessary for doing good art history would enable scholars and students to draw sound conclusions about the differences between what Blake etched on his copper plates and what was added or changed afterwards in printing and coloring the impressions (Appendix VIII.6). But the published reproductions upon which much art-historical study necessarily depends simply cannot record such details with sufficient accuracy. Even scholars who are able to globetrot from collection to collection end up relying heavily upon their inadequate memories, notes, xeroxes, and photographs to compensate for the distances in time and space between collections. Seeing the original prints, paintings, manuscripts, and typographical works is good in itself; but seeing them in fine, trustworthy reproductions, in context and in relation to one another is the scholarly ideal. Difficulty of access to originals and reliance on inadequate reproductions has handicapped and distorted even the best efforts. Again, the inevitable result has all too frequently been distortions of the record, misconstructions, and the waste of considerable scholarly labor.
We began by tackling the multitude of challenges presented by a single category of Blake's work, his "illuminated books." The illuminated books had their genesis in a series of graphic experiments that Blake began around 1788 and quickly evolved into a program of combining visual and textual elements in printed pages that Blake could control--design, write, etch, print, and color--himself. Though he produced a great deal of work in other media, the illuminated books (c. 1788-1827) span most of his productive life and reflect its characteristic patterns. These much-discussed books are fundamental to his artistic reputation for several good reasons: they are spectacular examples of the illustrated book at one extreme of its development; fascinating explorations of the interactions between texts and designs at a level of narrative maturity seldom matched and never exceeded; major instances of the transformations of traditional iconography in the late eighteenth century; and central documents in British romanticism, both as historical period and as ideology.
In his lifetime, Blake produced about 175 copies of his 19 illuminated books. About 20% of those--40 or so--have been reproduced, sometimes well, sometimes execrably, but in no coherent historical order. By the end of the first phase of our project, we plan to reproduce approximately 56 copies, about half of which have never been reproduced before. This will constitute, for the first time, an archive of reproductions suitable for serious research. Only in the past five years, largely as a result of Viscomi's extensive research, has the history of the production of the illuminated books been correctly understood. That in turn has made possible for the first time a sound scholarly archive, including numerous copies of the illuminated books that have been neglected because their place in the history of production was not understood.
Our next task is to add drawings, paintings, and several kinds of prints, manuscripts, and rare or unique typographical works to the Archive. Doing so will yield an augmented "Blake" considerably larger than the one most familiar to students and scholars. Without sacrificing the Blake of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the extended archive will reveal the painter-printmaker whose illuminated books emerged from the materials, work routines, and imagery of eighteenth-century history painting, watercolor drawing, and graphic arts, as well as from the literary routines of Milton, the Bible, Swedenborg, and Boehme, which students of Blake have more often investigated. Commercial illustrations, for example, can bring into focus a major convergence between Blake's illuminated book Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and his engravings to J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (etched 1791). Even the familiar profile of a poet-Blake can be deepened by the inclusion of Blake's extensive group of literary illustrations, such as those to Milton's poems, which should be seen in connection with Blake's 50-plate illuminated book Milton.
We are hoping, of course, that the Archive, once extended to encompass the full range of Blake's work, will ultimately set a new standard of accessibility to a vast collection of visual and textual materials that are central to an adequate grasp of the British art and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But we have also come 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 fallen back on, 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.
The collaborative procedures we have begun to develop, which we hope will become useful prototypes of "distance editing," depend upon the intensive day-to-day teamwork among the three editors and the staff of IATH to integrate the textual, art-historical, critical, and technical expertise necessary for the construction of a scholarly resource as complex as this one. We see the products of our collaboration as similarly prototypical: in facing new technical and editorial challenges, the Blake project will leave future archivers, editors, and cataloguers the benefits of new tools. The Document Type Definition (DTD) developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has become the default standard for encoded electronic texts. We believe that its standard counterpart for encoded electronic images may well turn out to be the evolving Blake Archive DTD. In this image-oriented non-TEI DTD--an art historian's DTD if you will--we are constructing the most comprehensive applied product of its kind, one robust and flexible enough to be readily adapted to the needs of many other projects. In addition, software developed by IATH, such as our Java applets Inote and ImageSizer, will be adaptable to virtually any project in which images are important.
Because the signal advantage of electronic editing and cataloguing is the open-endedness that makes it possible to add materials, correct errors, incorporate new discoveries, and construct new relationships, we have believed from the first that our principal objective-- the most significant contribution we can hope to make--should be the creation of a sound and durable foundation for decades of future scholarship. Since 1995, when the Getty Grant Program underwrote the initial phase of our project, we have worked to shape the foundations of the Archive in strict accordance with our original ideals and priorities.
Background, 1991-1994. In 1991-93, at work on two printed volumes in a new series published by the Blake Trust, Tate Gallery, and Princeton University Press (see below, Methodology), we 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 new D. G. Rossetti project, the Rossetti Archive, 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.
We applied to become Associate Networked Fellows of IATH and drew up a preliminary proposal for a Blake "archive"--stealing McGann's term for our somewhat different purposes--in three major phases that would tackle first the difficulties presented by the illuminated books, second the remaining categories of work in Blake's oeuvre (prints, paintings, drawings, texts), and third such issues as secondary publication (on disks), interpretive supplementary material, and educational applications.
In 1994 Essick designed a pilot project with John Sullivan, photographer at the Huntington Library and Art Galleries in California. Using Kodak Photo-CD technology, they created a database of the Huntington's extensive Blake collections and a public workstation at the Huntington Blake exhibition and conference in October of that year. (As a result, we were able to reject Photo-CD technology for the Archive early on.) Viscomi, who had earlier supervised color-corrected transparencies for two volumes of the new Blake Trust edition, assembled a similar base of materials to begin exploring key factors in digital reproduction. Meanwhile, Eaves, whose scholarly interests include editorial theory in connection with the history of technology, read widely in the growing body of scholarship concerned with electronic texts as well as with more practical matters such as hardware and software, digital reproduction, marking systems, networking, and so on.
Blake Archive, Phase One, 1995-1998. In 1995, we applied for and received a three-year grant from the Getty Grant Program to underwrite the initial three years of planning and execution focused on the illuminated books. The Blake project was the first opportunity for IATH to work intensively with researchers from outside the University of Virginia community. The Institute provided the team with full-scale technical assistance and archive-design consultation, along with the necessary equipment to establish the foundations of the Archive.
Year 1, 1995-96: The Institute phase of the project began with Joseph Viscomi as a resident fellow for the year. With our first project manager, Amy Sexton, and a student technical assistant in place, the three editors met with IATH staff in the summer of 1995--in retrospect, the first "Blake camp," as we came to call these annual planning and problem-solving sessions. We drew up a two-phase plan that would take us seven years out: two periods of three years each (illuminated books first, then the remaining work) separated by a transition year. At the end of the seven years the architecture of the Blake Archive would be complete and all its wings would have substantial content.
We agreed easily on our division of labor as an outgrowth of the editors' experience with the Blake Trust volumes. We would make all final decisions collectively. We would deal with institutions according to our individual experience with them. Beyond that, Eaves and Essick would share major responsibility for generating the bibliographical information (at the plate, copy, and work levels) and image descriptions (at the level of whole designs and individual details associated with "characteristics," terms that provide the textual basis for image searches). Viscomi would take major responsibility for generating color-corrected digital images and accurate texts of Blake's work. Among other duties--parsing the SGML markup, moving works from testing to publication, etc.--the project manager would coordinate activities at IATH, including our project's access to the technical staff. Everyone would join in proofreading and testing.
We compiled a prioritized list of illuminated books (for our principles of selection see below, Methodology) and began to seek cooperation from key collections of Blake material. After reading and consultation that included sessions with a member of the Getty/MESL (Museum Educational Site Licensing) project in digital imaging, we conducted extensive trials to determine the optimum balance of photographic format, scanning resolution, and file size for an archive of this type. Key benchmarks were arrived at (see below, Methodology and Appendix IV), and enough fundamental design work was completed to proceed to the next stage. We established blake-proj, the online discussion group that has proven essential to the collaboration that has been a hallmark of the Archive's development.
By the end of this inaugural year we had concluded agreements with four contributors that control access to thousands of Blake's images, the Library of Congress (which became our official co-sponsor), the Huntington Library and Art Galleries, Glasgow University Library in Scotland, and the Essick Collection, the largest collection of Blake and his followers in private hands. The editors personally supervised a six-day photographic session at the Library of Congress that yielded 620 images. All the new photography was in our benchmark format, 4x5 color transparencies with color bars and gray scales.
During the year we made our first public outings. We presented our plans at the Society for Textual Studies meeting in New York and did our first demonstration (using mockups) at the meeting of the Society for Documentary Editing in Baltimore. Finally, we opened a Web version of the Blake Archive to the public with two copies each of Blake's Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, using the first version of our page design, lightly coded in HTML only, with no search capabilities or Java applets.
Year 2, 1996-97: In retrospect this was a make-or-break year. At the second summer Blake camp we discussed our goals: to pursue negotiations with additional major collections; to complete the first version of the Blake Archive DTD--the Document Type Definition (DTD) for the SGML-encoded illuminated books; to add search capabilities for images as well as for texts; and to ready a single work for publication in something approaching a fully operative form that we could test. New hardware (a server), software (DynaWeb, the search engine that we adopted), and technical support were donated by Sun Microsystems and Inso Corporation.
We decided to incorporate two significant reference works: an extensive bibliography of works useful in the study of Blake, and David V. Erdman's standard printed edition, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (complete with Erdman's textual notes). We published the bibliography in 1997; a later version will compile specialized bibliographies on the fly. The Erdman edition presents more formidable challenges, including a separate TEI-compliant DTD. The first round of SGML/TEI encoding was completed in 1997, but, in order to create the kind of searchable text, integrated with the rest of the Archive, that we envision, a good deal of further work has had to go into the project. We have tested three early versions; we anticipate publication in 1998-99.
A sophisticated final design for the site, complete with search engine and a Java applet, INote, was refined over several months of discussion, experiment, testing, and revision. Inote, a tool designed at IATH for image viewing and annotation, was integrated with the search engine to zoom in automatically on particular visual details and display the editor's descriptions in image searches. We decided that users must have a way of controlling the size of images. The result was ImageSizer, a second Java applet, which allows a user to view images at their original size or to enlarge and reduce them at will (Appendix VIII.12,13,19).
Meanwhile, the three editors at their separate outposts and the project manager and technical assistant at IATH proceeded according to the division of labor that had been worked out the previous year. Digital scanning, painstaking image-by-image color correction on special professional equipment (Appendix VIII.14-16), and elaborate SGML markup of all images in the illuminated books began in earnest. (The scanning was done by student assistants in Charlottesville, color correction by Viscomi on calibrated professional equipment at the University of North Carolina, and SGML markup of the illuminated books at the University of California, Riverside [Essick] and the University of Rochester [Eaves].) As always, the Archive discussion group blake-proj remained the place where all momentous and trivial issues were hashed out daily--from the placement of a "button," to the erratic behavior of text and image searches, to formidable questions about copyright in the electronic domain. In addition, we created a work-in-progress Web site (our WIP site), accessible by password, where we could conduct all our pre-publication testing.
During the year we made public presentations of the Archive in New York, Washington DC, New Haven, Cambridge (UK), and Oxford (UK). We also reached final agreements with two new contributors, the New York Public Library and the Yale Center for the Study of British Art, and continued the process of acquiring and scanning 4x5 transparencies as we approached other major repositories.
Year 3, 1997-98 (current): Whatever remained unresolved in our usual forums--the test site and blake-proj--was moved onto the agenda of the third Blake camp, a particularly vigorous three days in Charlottesville in June 1997 that allowed us to get to the bottom of several thorny problems--the logic of searches, the operation of Inote, the consistency of displays, the structure of the SGML hierarchy--that were blocking the first publication of a fully searchable and resizable work in the Archive. After two months of intensive tweaking and testing, we added a detailed Help document and opened the new site to the public in August 1997 with a single fully searchable and resizable work, The Book of Thel copy F from the Library of Congress--a mere eight plates but, as far as we were concerned, a landmark.
At Blake camp we had determined that 1997-1998 was to be a year of production and publication that would move us toward the primary goal we specified in the original plan: to publish at least one copy of each of Blake's 19 illuminated books, along with multiple copies of several books. As of September 1998 27 copies of 16 books have been published, and we are testing further copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Urizen, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Milton for release by early 1999.
During the year we reached agreements with the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York), the Houghton Library (Harvard University) and, most recently, the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge University). At all those collections we have begun the process of acquiring the necessary photographs (at the Morgan Library, for instance, the editors supervised a three-day photographic session that produced 220 images). We benefited from generous loans of file transparencies from several of our contributors. The Archive received a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London)--perhaps the first, if we are not mistaken, to be given by the Mellon Centre in support of an electronic project.
Transition year, 1998-99. We shall spend this coming year consolidating our gains and preparing for a second phase of development in 1999-2000.
After final testing, we shall publish our TEI-compliant, searchable electronic version of David Erdman's edition of Blake's Complete Poetry and Prose, which will have been in production for more than two years.
We shall continue publishing additional copies of illuminated books in order to clear our second hurdle: after publishing one copy of every illuminated book (by June 1999), to publish at least one copy of every printing of every book, according to the historical rationale that sets our priorities (see below, Methodology). Given the requirements of color correction, transcription, description, proofreading, and testing, this is a formidable objective, since each copy of an illuminated book constitutes an edition in its own right, complete with bibliographical information, copy-level "diplomatic" texts, and copy-level image descriptions. We shall also add multiple copies of works from several printings--mostly copies that have seldom or never been reproduced or reproduced badly--and begin to incorporate related materials that help document the history of production in context (individual proofs, early states, sketches, associated drawings, prints, and paintings).
As a result of our recent success with several major collections, we have available to us numerous additional illuminated books. Some of those are already somewhere in the long pipeline--unscanned transparencies, raw scans, color-corrected images, edited texts, encoded bibliographic information and image descriptions, parsed SGML, and tested works--from acquisition to publication. Publishing editions of the books now in the pipeline, plus others that we plan to acquire from contributors, will continue as a major priority well into 1999-2000 and beyond.
All members of our new advisory board--a broad group of museum curators and directors, art historians, textual critics, romanticists, authorities in humanities computing, and Blake scholars (Appendix I)--have agreed to participate in the testing of new works at our work-in-progress site. To facilitate communication with and among members, we plan to set up a new online discussion group for them later this year. Beyond that, we shall survey their reactions to the Archive and discuss with them the data we need to collect from our entire community of users.
Meanwhile, we will carry out several secondary housecleaning tasks. Perhaps the most important is to revise the extensive "book of terms," the controlled vocabulary of "characteristics" used to conduct image searches. We have held off on this kind of review while tagging the first complete round of illuminated books because each new book adds new terms to the list. The list will be substantially complete and stable once Jerusalem is tagged later this year, and at that point we shall have the necessary perspective to conduct a thorough review, aiming for gains in consistency, efficiency, and ease of use.
Finally, of course, we shall continue to acquire additional works from our contributing institutions and to establish cooperation with other institutions whose collections we feel will strengthen the Archive. As a result of our successes with every American institution with an important collection and, most recently, with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, we think we are well positioned to persuade other British institutions to contribute. We already have access to more than enough material to represent very amply the artistic range of Blake and his contemporaries.
Blake Archive, Phase Two, 1999-2002. We shall begin a new phase of development with three principal aims: to continue adding illuminated books to the Archive; to extend the image-oriented Blake Archive DTD and stylesheets to accommodate the other categories of Blake's works; and to incorporate a significant representation of work from these categories into the new "wings" of the Archive. In the process, we shall double the size of the Archive and make it fully representative of the range of Blake's work. As we extend the reach of the Archive to accommodate such works, we shall also begin to build a statistical database of information about the uses of the Archive and develop a method of assessing users' responses.
We shall begin by assessing the requirements, scholarly and technical, of each category of work required to complete the structure of the Archive: prints (original and reproductive), paintings, drawings, manuscripts, typographical works. From that assessment will flow the design for the ultimate SGML architecture. Although we started with the illuminated books because they required us to address the problems of both texts and pictures (discrete, juxtaposed, and fused), the other categories of Blake's oeuvre are distinct in important respects. For instance, the illuminated books are book-like in scale; none is as small as Blake's smallest works or as large as his largest paintings. The issue of scale--to take only that one--raises art-historical questions (should we continue to privilege the actual size of the images?) and technical questions (should we limit the use of ImageSizer or extend its capabilities?) that we must deal with. The task at hand would be to anticipate changes in the DTD and stylesheets, interface, image descriptions, art-historical and textual information, and arrive at an initial set of blueprints that will allow us to proceed in adding new sections of Blake's oeuvre to the Archive.
Along with the redesign and extension of the DTD come problems of rendering and description--how to render images across various new categories in ways that will be coherent with the rest of the Archive and yet remain faithful to the images themselves. Blake's work beyond the illuminated-book canon includes the drawings, paintings, and prints on which the artist spent most of his productive life, along with important typographical works and manuscripts. Although the Archive has been designed from the start with the aim of accommodating all of Blake's work (and, for that matter, the work of his contemporaries as well), these additional categories will require special attention at each stage: scanning and correcting line engravings, for instance, present new technical problems, such as a tendency toward optical distortion in areas of close crosshatching, that we shall have to solve; single "paintings," separate "plates," and continuous "pages" of type involve us in structural relations distinct from those characteristic of the illuminated books. Similarly, we shall have to work out protocols for describing images that are in many respects unlike the images of the illuminated books for which our present controlled vocabulary has been developed.
Our plan is to begin the shift from illuminated works to the other categories with two large and significant bodies of material: Blake's illustrations of the Book of Job and of John Milton's poems, in several different media (almost 200 items). These images, which are often historically, thematically, and formally related to the illuminated books, meet two criteria of "significance": they are representative of Blake's oeuvre as a whole, and they are among the works most often studied by Blake scholars. Hence they constitute a logical, large but manageable, first extension of what we have already done. The Huntington, one of our contributors, holds the world's largest collection of Blake's illustrations to the works of Milton.
From these clusters we shall move to others, generally guided by the following priorities: original works in coherent series that are closely related to the illuminated books, individual works closely related to the illuminated books, works in significant subcategories where we can provide a large and representative sample, the commercial prints (separate and in series, first those designed and engraved by Blake, then those designed by Blake, followed finally by those engraved by Blake), manuscripts (such as letters), and typographical works. (See Plan of Work, below.)
This approach--to expand coherently from the core outward--has dominated the first phase of our development and will continue to dominate the second, as it must if we are to maximize the usefulness of the Archive to students and scholars. The new means of access we have provided, such as powerful image-searching capabilities, are most valuable to users when searches are conducted across related bodies of material. We are not ignoring the competing criterion of representativeness--far from it--and the tension between depth and breadth can be productive. We believe that our approach stands the best chance of serving both needs at once. That is, the Archive will steadily become more representative as it becomes more extensive but at the least possible sacrifice of utilitarian coherence. We are always aware of the dangers of mere sampling, however extensive, perhaps because the World Wide Web itself offers so many terrifying object lessons.
By the end of our second phase, in 2002, the Archive will contain approximately 3000 images, about 2/3 from the illuminated books, the remaining 1/3 from Blake's paintings, drawings, engravings, manuscripts, and typographical works.
Blake Archive, Beyond 2002: We have in mind the incorporation of collation and other text-analysis software at a stage when that addition would be genuinely useful. At some point we hope to add the several hundred monochrome and color photographs compiled for Martin Butlin's two-volume catalogue raisonné of Blake's paintings and drawings. The photos are held by the Mellon Centre. They constitute another valuable aid to reference and, tagged in SGML, an extension of the database for image searches that would make it very nearly comprehensive.
Once we have published a significant representation of the full range of Blake's work, we shall give more serious consideration to other areas--pedagogical ones, for instance. Soon we want to begin seriously weighing the factors involved in reproduction on portable disks (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM): what should be on them, how many there should be, and how they should be published and distributed. With the disks we are trying to respond simultaneously to our users' desire for convenience and portability and to the necessity for the Archive to work out its own future. These decisions are important, and difficult, for several reasons: if the disks include supplementary material and have a complex structure, they may be more useful but will take longer to produce and will be more expensive. If we think in terms of a single disk for a vast body of works, that disk will again be much more expensive than smaller groups of items in a series of disks. It might be best to tailor different editions for different audiences of students and scholars, and to marry some disks to the Web site. In any case, we plan to consult our advisory board, our contributors, and our users on their preferences well in advance of final decisions.
At some stage we shall begin to incorporate the work of Blake's contemporaries, a goal from the beginning, logical for several reasons, including the practical fact that a collection that is rich in the work of Blake is likely to be rich in the work of others close to him.
Our ultimate goal, in the most ambitious terms, is to represent Blake's entire oeuvre--to incorporate as much of it, in fact, as individual collectors and institutions will allow--along with a substantial cross-section of the work of his contemporaries; and to integrate, to the maximum degree possible, our individual Archive with all its kin on the Web. The more modest formulation of our aim is to create a central resource for anyone who wants to explore the work of Blake and his contemporaries, no matter how long it takes us. The concept of a multimedia Blake Archive on the Web (or its successor) caught our attention, after all, because the basis of the project in SGML (which, even if replaced by another standard, will be portable to whatever code replaces it) promises a long and useful life for it. The combination of longevity with vast reserves of flexibility and extendibility is perhaps the Archive's greatest attraction to us as collaborating editors. We are confident that the Archive we are building is among not only the most exciting and timely but also the soundest, most useful, and most imitable of the latest generation of electronic resources.
It makes sense to see 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, a genuinely adequate comprehensive archival edition of Blake's work. The dominant tradition of Blake editing has been overwhelmingly literary. The historical Blake, a printmaker and painter by training who added poetry to his list of accomplishments, has been converted, editorially, into a poet whose visual art is acknowledged but moved off to the side where it becomes largely invisible, partly because of what one of Blake's first critics, the poet Swinburne, called "hard necessity"--the technological and economic obstructions that have prevented the reproduction of accurate images in printed editions. 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 the interconnections of the two at the source. Methodologically, the William Blake Archive is an attempt to restore historical balance through the syntheses made possible by the electronic medium. The resulting archival editorial form will, we believe, help to transform scholarly approaches to Blake and, potentially, to the art and literature of his era. The methodology behind the Archive and the standards associated with it are, we believe, in line with this claim.
The editors have been working on several fronts to change the dominant editorial mode. The collective facts and arguments of four books, Essick's Separate Plates of William Blake (Princeton, 1983) and Blake's Commercial Book Illustrations (Oxford, 1991), Eaves's The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Cornell, 1992), and Viscomi's Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, 1993) have laid the groundwork for the editorial transformation that the electronic Blake Archive is designed to accomplish.
In 1993, we made an initial trial of our basic editorial principles and procedures in two printed volumes, William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books and William Blake: "Milton a Poem" and the Final Illuminated Works (Blake Trust/Tate Gallery/Princeton). For these volumes, reproductions, based on large-format transparencies, were rigorously controlled for color fidelity, and we devised a multi-layered editorial apparatus that 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. 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 in previous sections, 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 the existence of a radically revised 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. (Maximizing the usefulness of our image- and text-searching tools is only one of several good reasons for doing so.) 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 all of Blake's typographical works, which are all rare or unique.
For details of our plans for expansion, see the Plan of Work, below.
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 so fundamental that it deserves to be highlighted: 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, 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.
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. (For a brief pictorial guide to the Archive illustrating the major points in the discussion below, see Appendix VIII.) 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:
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, Library of Congress). From this "generic work-view" page the user can link to a bibliography (for the work Thel) or to information About the Work, which provides a brief introduction and a full list of the extant copies of that work and their current locations.
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 2 of copy F (Appendix VIII.17-18). This, the "object view," is the fundamental level of the Archive, to which all else is oriented. 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 with 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 terms 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) 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. 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 (see Appendix VIII.5). 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, simply because any transcription of Blake's irregular etched texts into the uniformities of conventional print is at best a translation. We feel no need to resort to elaborate typography and editorial sigla, the "barbed wire" that Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson famously protested in modern scholarly editions, because the Archive permits users to examine transcriptions beside superior reproductions of the originals by using the transcription button on each object-view page.
Images: Fidelity in the reproduction of images is a top priority. 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 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 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 4x5-inch format or larger, with color bars and gray scales. (Our experiments with digital cameras revealed major disadvantages over conventional film for our purposes, and we doubt that we could obtain permissions for the special photography in most cases.) Once digitized (at high resolution 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--by one of the editors on professional equipment designed and calibrated for that purpose. The main object-view page provides reproductions at 100 dots per inch (dpi) compressed in JPEG format. That resolution is fine enough for most purposes and requires graphics 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), which on most systems takes a few seconds longer to load for viewing, is 300 dpi (JPEG). The enlargement yields superb detail for close inspection of printing and coloring (Appendix VIII.4,5). Our standards of reproduction are, in short, as high as we believe they can be under the circumstances. (For an example of color correction, see Appendix VIII.14-16; for technical details, see Appendix IV.)
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 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 new 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, for convenience, any smaller or larger size (Appendix VIII.12,13,19).
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.
Copyright information: 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. The prominence of material objects in our schema also 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 edition heavily depends 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; we return copyright of the color-corrected digital images themselves (with file copies of those images) back to the owner institutions. 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--thus all users must indicate explicit agreement with the conditions of use, including copyright restrictions, that we stipulate on our home page. Moreover, a detailed copyright notice is linked to every reproduction from the object-view page (the link is the copyright symbol beneath the image). Additional copyright information is linked to the Info button in ImageSizer beneath each image.
Information about using the Archive: Detailed instructions are available to the user from all relevant pages (from the Help button). To improve clarity, we have augmented verbal instructions and explanations with graphics, such as annotated screen images (Appendix VIII.17-19).
Bibliographical information and metadata: Each image appears along with its full bibliographical information (production history, physical characteristics, provenance, present location) at the level where that information becomes most relevant (work, copy, plate, etc.). Thus a user looking for The Book of Thel will find information about that work (comprising all its copies, or instances) linked to the "work" page. But all instances of the work are indeed embodied in physical forms--"copies." Copy information--on, say, copy F of The Book of Thel--is linked to every plate of that copy (Appendix VIII.3). When there is significant separate information about the individual plate, that is provided by a link from the dimensions that appear below each object. ImageSizer is also configured to deliver (at the Info button just beneath the image) several kinds of information about the image. In addition to its owner, present location, contact information, and copyright restrictions, the information includes a precise history of the production of the reproduction itself from physical object to electronic image via photography, scanning, and color correction. This administrative metadata, the "image record," is embedded in the image file itself and travels with the image (if downloaded, for instance) (see Appendix IV).
Information about designs: The Archive provides information about Blake's pictures in several complementary forms at more than one level. Although information cannot be completely separated from interpretation, our emphasis is strongly on information and hence on description. If interpretations are added to the Archive at some stage, they will be identified as such. The meticulous descriptions themselves may have considerable significance, however. Many interpretations have been based on weak, partial, or mistaken impressions of what appears in the designs. And again, users do not have to depend ultimately upon our textual descriptions; when in doubt, they may examine the enlargements from one or more copies. General but fairly comprehensive descriptions of each image are available from the Illustration Information link on every object-view page--including, for example, the minute interlinear designs of Blake's illuminated books.
Inote, which can be invoked from each general description, will bring up the pertinent illustration in a separate window, with access to more elaborate descriptions of individual details within illustrations. The importance of images and their contexts to the project registers powerfully in this Java applet--developed at IATH and configured to the needs of the Archive--which is available from every object-view page and from the illustration-information window. By means of a location-grid/overlay metaphor, Inote makes it possible to view whole images, components (details) of images, and descriptions of any or all of them. When the user of Inote clicks on any sector of the image, the descriptions of all components in that sector appear (Appendix VIII.12-13). 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. Inote is also used extensively in image searches (see below). Individual copies of Inote are available for downloading to the user's desktop computer, where it can be used to record the user's own annotations personal use, making the Archive interactive. (For technical details see Appendix IV.)
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 the moment the searchable texts are restricted to Blake's works, but the aim is to make all texts in the Archive--including image descriptions, provenances, and image records--searchable. (This would be one of the goals of our second phase.) 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 (Appendix VIII.7-8). 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" will 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--has been made possible by combining the resources of SGML, DynaWeb (our search engine), Inote, and 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 (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 study any or all of the other descriptions associated with the image (Appendix VIII.9-13).
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.
During the second phase of development we shall continue with the division of labor and the system of collaboration we have developed during the past three years: collectively, the editors make final decisions about the form and content of the Archive and control the workflow. At the University of North Carolina, Viscomi takes major responsibility for acquiring, scanning, and color-correcting new images on professional equipment designed for the purpose. (Scanning is being moved from IATH to Chapel Hill.) Viscomi also transcribes and edits the texts in the Archive. At the University of Rochester and University of California, Riverside, Eaves and Essick produce SGML-encoded descriptions of images and bibliographical information at various levels (plate or object level, copy level, series or work level, and so on). For testing, all the editors collaborate with all IATH staff members--who will be joined, in the future, by members of the new advisory board.
Since editorial decisions always have technical implications, they must be arrived at in consultation with the expert staff at IATH. The editors participate actively in discussing all details of execution within their technical reach and test the practical outcome on the Archive's work-in-progress site. Most of those ongoing conversations are conducted daily (and vigorously, sometimes for weeks at a time) on the project's electronic forum, blake-proj (Appendix V), supplemented of course by telephone, the annual Blake camps (see above, History), and meetings in person as needed. Day-to-day progress is coordinated by a project manager--currently Matthew Kirschenbaum, an advanced Ph.D. student in English--at the Institute. Any student assistants collaborate closely with the project manager and editors who oversee their work. The proof that this arrangement has worked well in moving the project along swiftly and efficiently is manifest, we believe, in the record of productivity to date. As we add new categories of Blake's work to the Archive, we shall continue to require significant technical support from IATH, whose configuration of expertise, like its mission in the humanities, is unique.
The Archive's first phase was defined by three goals: to design and construct the foundations of a searchable, SGML-encoded Archive; to acquire major works, mostly illuminated books, from major collections required for the basic structure of the Archive; and to place in the Archive, fully marked up and publicly accessible free on the Web, at least one copy of each illuminated book. We shall achieve the last of these goals by June 1999. By that date we shall also be very far along toward the subsequent goal of placing multiple copies of illuminated books in the Archive whenever possible, with the focus on those copies that represent different printings of each book. But since books printed in the same session can differ significantly--with important variants in coloring, motifs, arrangements, etc.--we are including multiple copies of books from the same printing as well as those from different printings. The public's exposure to Blake--and this includes many advanced students and not a few scholars--has been narrowly restricted to a small number of items that have been too frequently reproduced, such as Songs of Innocence copy B. We shall continue to acquire and incorporate copies never before reproduced or poorly reproduced--a category that unfortunately includes all but a very few of the books--thereby making rare and unique material widely accessible, in many cases for the first time.
Thus at the start of our second phase we shall still be spending a good deal of our time on illuminated books. By the end of the second phase, we shall be almost entirely preoccupied by works in other categories--prints of various kinds, drawings, paintings, manuscripts, and typographical works. We know in advance that the number of images that can be added to the Archive in the second phase will be fewer than the number added in the first phase: marking up 5 copies of a single 10-plate illuminated book for a total of 50 plates takes less time, once a prototype is established, than marking up 50 entirely separate items of the kind that will be the focus of phase two.
We should explain several important conditions that would make it highly inefficient to organize our work in a single lock-step sequence. Our "pipeline" is really several interconnected lines: transparencies acquired in, say, year one may not be scanned and color-corrected until year two, and not fully marked up until year three. At any moment, all three activities are going on--many more than three, especially if we include the design and testing of software. If we held up any one of these activities for the others, the flow of work in the pipeline would slow to a trickle. We would point to our record of performance as the best evidence of the efficiency of our system of production.
The most influential underlying conditions arise from the need to take maximum advantage of the opportunities offered by the several collections of our institutional contributors, and to coordinate those opportunities with the work of the three editors and the technical staff at IATH. For example, it has been most efficient to work collection by collection when acquiring transparencies and permissions. Some transparencies we can borrow (on short deadlines); those have to be scanned and corrected (a very time-consuming chore) immediately, no matter what else is in the pipeline. Other transparencies we acquire through new photography--some by the institution's internal staff (again, on their schedule), some by professional photographers (personally assisted by one of us). Thus, understandably, we have acquired images in categories other than the category with the highest priority, illuminated books, during phase one. We have a large number of these transparencies on hand now--about 750 ready to be digitized, corrected, marked up, and placed in the Archive at an appropriate time. Of these, 135 will be published in the Archive this year (1998-99), with publication of the remaining 615 distributed over the grant period (1999-2002). While this mode of acquisition may seem unnecessarily complicated, in fact it has paid off handsomely: as a result, the time and money involved in acquiring images during phase two will be considerably less than it otherwise might have been. (See below, total number of images to be acquired.)
In phase two, we plan to add the non-illuminated works generally guided by these priorities:
I.a. Clusters of significant works, such as Blake's Job and Milton illustrations, that are most closely related to the illuminated books and to one another. This step maintains the core coherence in the Archive as it grows and at the same time provides scholars and students with the range of materials they have found most valuable for study.
I.b: Individual works that are also related to the illuminated books, such as proofs, separate colored impressions, commercial engravings, etc.
II.a: Works in subcategories of which we can provide a large and representative sample, such as the famous group of twelve large "color prints" of 1795.
II.b: The entire group of original and reproductive prints, first those both designed and engraved by Blake (such as the engravings for Young's poem Night Thoughts), followed first by those designed by Blake and engraved by others (such as the illustrations to Blair's poem The Grave), and finally by those engraved by Blake after other artists.
III: Manuscripts and typographic works, all either unique or very rare.
From those priorities we project the following plan of work. The plan is premised on two sturdy assumptions. (1) The crucial work involved in extending our image-oriented Blake Archive DTD will be greatest in the first year of the second phase, 1999-2000. Questions about rendering--how best to display the new materials, how to adjust the stylesheets associated with the DTD accordingly--will require additional time and effort. (2) The rest of the archiving and editing process will continue throughout the period, though the balance of work will shift: the effort involved in acquisition will be greater toward the beginning, while production, editing, and testing will be greater toward the end. Representative samples of work will be incorporated into each category in the first year, in the process of extending and testing the DTD and stylesheets. The most important rule of thumb, however, is that new works will be steadily added to the Archive throughout the period. Thus the schematic plan that follows, divided into discrete years, is indicative but unavoidably artificial to some extent.
July-Dec.: Approx. 325 images: We shall continue to add copies of seldom- or never- reproduced illuminated books, such as Songs of Innocence copies D and Q, Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies E and Y, Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies A and B, and Jerusalem copy F.
IATH work in this period will be focused on finalizing the DTD as it applies to illuminated books, and on constructing the technical means for navigating back and forth between the Blake Archive DTD and TEI materials, including the Archive bibliography and Erdman's edition of Blake.
IATH staff will also be working on the assimilation of Blake Archive materials and practices into its networked document management system, Astoria, and on the automation of some of the versioning, updating, and electronic publishing tasks that the Archive currently manages by hand.
Jan.-June: Approx. 190 images: We shall concentrate on representative items from two large and important clusters of work in several media, Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job and to John Milton's poems--images that Blake produced across the entire span of his working life. The Job designs, which include separate designs, two series of water colors, and a set of reduced drawings, culminate in his masterful series of line engravings, Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). The illustrations to Milton's major poems, including L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the Nativity ode, Comus, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained, are intricately and profoundly related to his illuminated books, especially to Milton a Poem, of course, and to the entire range of his illustrations to the Bible.
IATH work will focus on extending the Blake Archive DTD to encompass works in other visual media (watercolors, drawings, line engravings, etc.) and in other literary forms. A major concern at this point will be the design of an information structure that can contain and facilitate intellectual access to a broader range of materials than the Blake Archive, to date, has contained. We also expect that the digital imaging of these new Blake media will raise new issues with respect both to the standards and practices of the Blake Archive and to the technical implementation of some Archive-wide tools, such as Inote and the ImageSizer applet. During this period, we would hope to identify and analyze, but not resolve, those issues.
July-Dec.: Approx. 155 images: We shall continue adding to the clusters of designs in series: the seven Dante engravings that Blake was working on when he died, the late so-called Genesis Manuscript, and the 116 illustrations to the poems of Thomas Gray. Finally, we shall add Blake's large color prints of 1795, which include some of his best-known images.
IATH work will deal, on the SGML side, with the new issues raised by the large color prints (such as scale) and on the technical/editorial details of how best to present images of this sort in the context of the Archive. We hope, by the end of this period, to have accomplished whatever design changes are required in the Archive's image-related applications, standards, and practices. (By the end of this period, we would also publicly document those standards and practices.)
Jan.-June: Approx. 100 images: After the designs in series we shall move to original book illustrations--that is, illustrations that are both designed and engraved by Blake. This important category includes the engraved illustrations to Commins's Elegy, Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life for Children (including drawings), Young's Night Thoughts, Little Tom the Sailor (broadside plus details), Hayley's Ballads of 1802 and 1805, the Prologue and Character of Chaucers Pilgrims (2 pls.), Thornton's edition of Virgil's Pastorals (Blake's only wood engravings, plus related relief etchings, drawings, and proof sheets), and Remember Me! (pl. and large watercolor).
Approx. 45 images: From Blake's original book illustrations we shall move to those designed by him but engraved by others--the illustrations for Blair's Grave and Burger's Leonora--followed by his original separate plates, including several states of Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims with details of the very large plate.
We anticipate that the anomalous publication formats involved in this phase of the project (wood engravings, broadsides, illustrated literary works, relief etchings) will require intensively revisiting the DTD and the stylesheets. If the IATH's Digital Library 2 proposal is funded, the Blake Archive would also be involved, during this period, in discussions and practical experiments with owner institutions (such as the Library of Congress) concerning the integration of the Archive's digital representations of Blake's materials into electronic finding aids and collections based elsewhere.
Throughout the year: Approx. 53 images: We shall continue adding seldom- or never-reproduced illuminated books, such as The Book of Thel copies B and N, The Book of Urizen copy M, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy H.
July-Sept.: Approx. 160 images: We shall add all of Blake's typographic works including the very rare Poetical Sketches (his only conventionally published volume of poems), The French Revolution (one copy extant, partly set in type but never published), the Descriptive Catalogue written for his 1809 exhibition (in the recently rediscovered copy owned by Blake's friend George Cumberland, containing unique annotations by Blake).
The appearance of typographic works will occasion a reconsideration of the relationship between the Blake Archive DTD and TEI standards, which may result in bringing the Blake Archive DTD into some version of TEI-conformity, or (more likely) into some higher-level relationship with TEI documents, perhaps through over-arching SGML architectural forms. If IATH is successful in its Digital Library 2 proposal, at this point the Blake Archive would also be involved in the design and testing of Web-based, SGML-aware text-analysis tools, and in discussions with a number of libraries and publishers on how best to integrate these idiosyncratic materials into larger, more homogenous electronic collections.
Oct.-June: Approx. 310 images: We shall then add all of Blake's copy engravings, including separate plates engraved but not designed by Blake, the three separate plates designed by Blake but engraved by others, and the book illustrations engraved by Blake after others.
Approx. 53 images: We shall add a number of Blake's letters.
On the technical side, we expect to be in production and maintenance mode at IATH by this point. Remaining issues might include the long-term archiving of the digital product called "The William Blake Archive," either by depositing content, or some frozen state of the content-plus-delivery-mechanisms, with selected libraries.
By this time, it would also be reasonable to expect IATH to be involved in the design and production of secondary educational materials based on the Archive, and in negotiations with publishers who might be interested in disseminating those products to educational markets, either on the Web or in portable-disk form.
Throughout the year: Approx. 82 images: We shall continue adding seldom- or never-reproduced illuminated books, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy S and Songs of Innocence copy O.
Estimated total number of images to be added to the Blake Archive 1999-2002: 1465. We estimate that, of these, 850 images remain to be acquired for phase two.
The full resources of the Archive are already available to all who can access it via the World Wide Web. We are committed to the continued development and maintenance of a free site, for reasons we have outlined above.
One of the foremost advantages of electronic publication is the ability of the medium to accommodate growth and change. In one sense, then, a final product and date of publication never arrive, at least not as they do in the world of print. That said, by the end of the second phase the Archive will have expanded very nearly to its full intended shape. The intricate SGML architecture and stylesheets required to integrate and display the full range of Blake's works in all media will have been developed, and each category will include a meaningful selection of significant works. By 2002, we believe, the Blake Archive will have taken its place among the preeminent models of serious humanistic scholarship in the medium.
From the start we have encouraged feedback from users via an e-mail link (we routinely respond to inquiries and comments from users). Recently we began collecting statistics on the use of the Archive, using software that counts the number and duration of hits for the site as a whole and for individual works ("Access Tracking," Appendix IV). During the second phase we shall design a questionnaire to survey our users' purposes and their opinions about the site, which we shall evaluate with the help of our advisory board.
During 1997-98, as the Archive has evolved from a demonstration site showing three short and unsearchable illuminated books to a fully functioning archive that incorporates (at this writing) complete editions of 27 copies of 16 of Blake's most popular illuminated works, its reputation has rapidly spread. The Archive is now linked to all the major search engines, scholarly reference sites (such as Voice of the Shuttle), compendia (such as Romantic Circles), and journals (such as Romanticism on the Net). By filling out a form at the site itself, users can now subscribe to Blake Archive Updates and automatically receive e-mail notices with the latest information; these notices are also regularly posted to several online discussion groups.
For the time being, the chief obstacle to ideal access is the familiar one: speed. We are designing the Archive with an eye to the technical improvements of the future. For now, however, we supply several partial remedies for the bandwidth restrictions of the present: (1) We give users options: images that are higher in resolution but slower to load than our inline images are made available by links; users with less adequate equipment or outdated browsers may bypass our Java applets entirely at the click of a mouse. (2) We continue to update and refine our software for optimal efficiency with current browsers (Inote was revised last year and is currently under revision again to keep up with changes in Java; we are now in the process of reassessing the functions of ImageSizer).
During the second phase, we would be especially interested in establishing multiple or "mirror" sites, perhaps in Europe, Japan, and Australia, to improve access time for users with less than optimal connections to the Internet. Eventually we plan to publish selected resources from the Archive in a second form. Those who need speed and portability--teachers in their classrooms, for example--will eventually be able to buy, at a price that individuals can pay, major works on portable disks. These amount to an extension, for the sake of convenience, of parts of the Archive. Although we have discussed disk publication with interested academic and commercial publishers, we must determine what publication arrangements are best for the future of the project as a whole.
We intend to include an exemplary copy of each printing of each illuminated book, along with supplementary copies and related material, such as drawings, proofs, and sketches. The list below records the books and their printings. Copies from the highlighted years are either in the Archive at present or in production, to be included by June 1999. We intend to add additional copies and related material from the years not highlighted during phase two of the project.
To date, these nine collections have been willing to contribute more than 2150 images, from which, in keeping with our focus on illuminated books during the first phase of the project, we have so far acquired nearly 1660 for the Archive. We will return to these collections for further material, both illuminated and non-illuminated, during the second phase of the project, as we also add material from other collections.
The electronic files containing the texts, images, and supporting apparatus for the William Blake Archive are distributed across three file servers on two separate machines: an Apache HTTPD server operating on a Sun SPARC Server 1000 (jefferson.village.virginia.edu) and an Apache HTTPD server and a DynaWeb server both operating on a Sun Ultra 1 (dazzle.village.virginia.edu). Both jefferson.village and dazzle.village run versions of the UNIX operating system. Both machines are located and maintained at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Scanning: Digital images are scanned from three types of source media: 4x5-inch transparencies and 8x10-inch transparencies (both of which include color bars and gray scales to ensure color fidelity), and 35mm slides. Transparencies are scanned on one of two flatbed scanners: a Microtek Scanmaker III and a Microtek Scanmaker V, both with transparent media adapters. Slides (which are only occasionally used in the Archive) are scanned on a Nikon LS-3510AF Slide Scanner.
Current versions of Microtek's ScanWizard software are used with the two flatbeds; the Nikon runs version 4.5.1 of its supporting plug-in. The Microtek III flatbed and the Nikon slide scanner are attached to a Macintosh PowerPC running OS 8.1; the Microtek Scanmaker V is attached to a Macintosh G3.
The baseline resolution for all scanned images is 300 dots per inch (dpi). All scanned images are scaled against the source dimensions of the original artifact so as to display at true-size on a monitor with a 100 dpi screen-resolution. As part of the scanning process for each image, a project assistant completes a form known as an Image Production (IP) record (Appendix VI). The IP records contain detailed technical data about the creation of the digital file for each image. These records are retained in hard copy at the project's office, and also become part of the Image Information record that is inserted into each image as metadata (see below).
The scanners and the monitors on the machines that support them are all calibrated on a regular basis; a project assistant uses a can of compressed air to blow dust, lint, and hair from the scanner bed and the transparency with every scan.
Color Correction: The "raw" images generated by the scanning process are then individually color-corrected against the original transparency or slide (which has itself been color-corrected against the original artifact) by an editor using Adobe Photoshop and professionally-calibrated hooded Radius PressView 17SR and 21SR monitors. The color-correction process, which takes upwards of thirty minutes &endash; and sometimes as long as several hours &endash; for each image is necessary in order to bring the color channels of the digital image into alignment with the hues and color tones of the original (Appendix VIII.14-16). This is a key step in establishing the scholarly integrity of the Archive because, although we cannot control the color settings on an individual user's monitor, the color-correction process ensures that each image will match the original artifact when displayed under optimal conditions (which we specify to users).
File Formats and Archival Storage: All scanned images are saved using the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) and archived as such on removable storage media &endash; both 8mm magnetic Exabyte tape and CD-ROM (in Mac/ISO 9660 hybrid format). These raw images would provide the source for newly color-corrected images should that ever become desirable or necessary.
The color-corrected images displayed to users in the online Archive are all served using the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group, ISO/IEC 10918) format. Users are presented with an in-line image at 100 dpi and have the option to view an enlargement at 300 dpi for the study of details (Appendix VIII.4). The 100 dpi JPEG is derived from the color-corrected JPEG at 300 dpi using ImageMagick, X11 software that enables the batch processing of image files from the UNIX command line.
Metadata: Each and every image in the Archive also contains textual metadata comprising its Image Information record. The Image Information record combines the technical data collected during the scanning process from the Image Production record with additional bibliographic documentation of the image, as well as information pertaining to provenance, present location, and the contact information for the owning institution. These textual records are, at the most literal level, a part of the Archive's image files. Image files are typically considered to be nothing but information about the images themselves (the composition of their pixelated bitmaps, essentially); but in practice, an image file can be the container for several different kinds of information. The Blake Archive takes advantage of this by slotting its Image Information records into that portion of the image file reserved for textual metadata. Because the textual content of the Image Information record now becomes a part of the image file itself in such an intimate way, this has the great advantage of allowing the record to travel with the image, even if it is downloaded and detached from the Archive's infrastructure. The Image Information record may be viewed using either the "Info" button located on the control panel of the Archive's ImageSizer applet (see below) or with the Text Display feature of standard software such as Adobe Photoshop or X-View.
All significant textual data in the Archive -- Blake's actual poetry and prose, as well as the editors' bibliographic commentary and illustration descriptions -- is encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, ISO 8879). SGML is not a programming language; it is a descriptive meta-language used to encode (or "tag") textual data in such a way that it will remain usable even as platforms and file formats change over time. To take a very simple example, whereas the word processor used to write this document would represent italics by means of a proprietary binary code, SGML would indicate italics with a plain ASCII tag such as: <hi rend="italic">this</hi>. By explicitly describing textual data according to a recognized ISO standard, SGML frees the Archive from reliance on the vicissitudes of proprietary software packages.
Document Type Definitions: A set of SGML tags designed for a specific purpose is known as a Document Type Definition (DTD). A DTD provides a hierarchical system of contexts and constraints which enables its tags to be used to create consistent document structures. The Blake Archive makes use of several DTDs developed specifically for the project at IATH. The primary and most expansive of these is known as the Blake Archive Description (BAD). The BAD DTD is used to encode all works at both the plate- and the copy-level (or more generically, at the object- and collection-level); its emphasis is on the description of Blake's works as physical artifacts. The BAD provides the basic document structure used by DynaWeb's stylesheets (see below) to deliver the Archive's content to users and also serves as the information-base consulted by the Archive's search engines (see below). The Archive's second DTD, the Blake Object Description (BOD) is used to encode the textual metadata comprising the Image Information record.
The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) DTD is used for other materials in the archive, such as its bibliographies and Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, where description of the physical artifact is not the DTD's central purpose.
DynaWeb: SGML-encoded files cannot be displayed by ordinary Web browsers. In order to take advantage of SGML's powerful document-structuring and information retrieval capabilities, while still allowing users seamless access to the Archive's content as an integral part of the World Wide Web, we use an advanced software package called DynaWeb (version 3.0), a product of Inso Corporation (formerly Electronic Book Technologies). DynaWeb performs two key functions for the Archive: first, it allows us to program "stylesheets," which translate all of our SGML-encoded files into standard HTML. This translation happens "on the fly," meaning that there is no need for us to create and maintain separate HTML files to mirror the Archive's SGML-encoded materials. Rather, our SGML is rendered as HTML by the DynaWeb stylesheets whenever it is accessed by a user with a Web browser. It should also be noted here that the default stylesheets packaged with the DynaWeb software have been extensively customized by the technical staff at IATH in order to accommodate the Archive's unique visual orientation and user interface requirements (Appendix VIII.3).
The second key function DynaWeb performs is to support the search engine used for both our text searching and our image searching (Appendix VIII.7-11). In each case the DynaWeb software consults the Archive's accumulated SGML-encoded information-base to return matches ("hits") for a user's search query. The Institute's programmers have modified this behavior of the DynaWeb software to include a history of an individual user's searches, which can then be consulted by the user to aid in refining a sophisticated query.
Java is a platform-independent programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in order to facilitate object-oriented programming in conjunction with the HTTP layer of the World Wide Web. This means that software written in Java can be "run" (activated) directly from ordinary Web pages, without requiring users to have pre-installed any of the software's files on their own personal machine and without regard for the type of computer or operating system used to access the Web page the Java software is invoked from (all of the major Web browsers are now Java-capable). The Blake Archive uses two separate Java applets (or applications), both developed at IATH in order to support the image-based editing that is fundamental to the project. Both of these applets, Inote and the ImageSizer, should be understood as computational implementations of the editorial practices governing the design of the Archive and its scholarly objectives. Both applets are based on version 1.1 of the Java Development Kit (JDK). As of November 1997, Java has been a candidate for adoption as an ISO standard.
Inote: Inote is an image-annotation tool. It permits us to append textual notes ("annotations") to selected regions (or "details") of a particular image; these annotations are generated directly from the SGML-encoded illustration descriptions prepared by the editors. Inote functions most powerfully when used in conjunction with the Archive's image searching capabilities, where it can open an image found by the search engine, zoomed to the quadrant of the image containing the object(s) of the search query, with the relevant textual annotation displayed in a separate window (Appendix VIII.12). From there, Inote allows the user to enlarge the image for further study and/or to access additional annotations located in other regions of the image. Inote may also be invoked directly from any of the Archive's Object View pages, allowing users to "browse" the annotations created for a given image (Appendix VIII.13).
In addition, users can download and install their own executable copies of Inote on their personal computers (using a version of the software programmed in the Java Runtime Environment); upon doing so, they may attach annotations of their own making to locally saved copies of an image, for use in either teaching or research. The most recent release of Inote is version 6.0.
ImageSizer: The ImageSizer is a sophisticated image manipulation tool (Appendix VIII.19). Its principle function for the Archive is to allow users to view Blake's work on their computer screens at its actual physical dimensions. Users may invoke the ImageSizer's calibration applet to set a "cookie" informing the ImageSizer of their own unique screen-resolution. Based on this data (recorded in the cookie), all subsequently viewed images will be resized on the fly so as to appear at their true size on the user's screen. If a user returns to the Archive at some later date from the same machine, the data stored by the cookie will remain intact, and there will be no need to recalibrate. Users may also set the ImageSizer's calibration applet to deliver images sized at consistent proportions other than true size, for example, at twice normal size (for the study of details). In addition, the ImageSizer allows users to enlarge or reduce the image within its on-screen display area, and to view the textual metadata comprising the Image Information record embedded in each digital image file (see above).
Work in Progress Site: The Archive maintains a password-protected Work in Progress (WIP) site for the exclusive use of the editors and the project staff (and the editorial board). The WIP site provides gateways to private testing ports on our servers, which allow us to proof works in the Archive's online environment without their being publicly accessible to users before they've reached their finished state. The WIP site also houses a variety of "tracking sheets," enabling the editors and project staff to accurately monitor the different stages of preparation for the many hundreds of text and image files comprising the Archive, as well as a Reference area and other documentary materials (such as a complete archive of postings from the blake-proj list &endash; see below).
E-mail: The Blake Archive currently operates two electronic mailing lists, one public and one private. The latter, an internal communications list known as "blake-proj," has existed since the project's inception, and serves as the focal point for discussions among the editors, the project staff, and the technical staff at the Institute. All traffic on blake-proj is automatically archived using shareware software known as Hypermail (version 1.02; see Appendix V). The second list, created much more recently, is called "blake-update." This is a public list for distribution of periodic updates on work completed at the Archive and other announcements. All users of the Archive may subscribe themselves directly to blake-update via a form on our front-end Web pages. Both lists are run by the widely-used Majordomo software (version 1.92), and are based and maintained at IATH.
Access Tracking: Access to all three of the Archive's servers (see above) is tracked using Wusage 5.0. This software provides daily records in both graphical and statistical form that allow us to observe the frequency with which texts and images are requested by users, as well as the type of browser and platform being used to access the Archive, the IP address of the users, and their domain name (allowing us to compare, say, access from educational sites with access from commercial sites).
Backup and Record Keeping: All of the Archive's data is safeguarded via daily incremental backups on magnetic tape. In the event of a catastrophic server failure or a malicious server break-in, the Archive's data could be quickly restored from the off-site backup system.
The Archive's project office retains hard copies of all Image Production records, as well as ledgers tracking electronic file transfers, consignment of TIFF images to tape and CD-ROM, and shipping of transparencies and slides. Hard copies of the DTD and the Archive's SGML are also retained at the project office.
See also:
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "Managing the Blake Archive." Romantic Circles. March 1998: http://orion.it.luc.edu/~sjones1/column7.htm
Collaboration is one of the hallmarks of the Blake Archive project. Much of it takes place in blake-proj, our online discussion group. This is a small fragment of the complete "thread index" of blake-proj communications.
· Re: Blake camp Morris Eaves
blake update John Unsworth
· Re: blake update Joseph Viscomi
· Re: blake update Morris Eaves
· Re: blake update Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: blake update John Unsworth
Fw: NCC Washington Update, Vol 4, #16, April 30, 1998 (fwd) Morris Eaves ARO film stock Bob Essick Songs Z markup Bob Essick Re: Blake camp Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: Blake camp Joseph Viscomi
Plate 24 in Songs Z Bob Essick info record Joseph Viscomi fitz update Joseph Viscomi
· Re: fitz update Morris Eaves
Songs Z, plate 7 Bob Essick Re: fitz update Matt Kirschenbaum new on WIP site Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: new on WIP site Matt Kirschenbaum
· server stats Joseph Viscomi
· Re: server stats Morris Eaves
Re: revisions to info records Matt Kirschenbaum tracking sheets updated Matt Kirschenbaum mostly on Songs Z Bob Essick fitz update and oxford Joseph Viscomi
· Re: fitz update and oxford Bob Essick
Songs Z comments Bob Essick Songs Z Bob Essick
· Re: Songs Z Morris Eaves
new books on test site Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: new books on test site Matt Kirschenbaum
Re: Internship Availability? (fwd) Morris Eaves Re: server stats Matt Kirschenbaum Re: revisions to info records Matt Kirschenbaum travel; Z-gram Bob Essick Re: server stats Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: blake-update John Unsworth
Re: blake-update Morris Eaves Re: front end and other matters Morris Eaves various Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: various Morris Eaves
· Re: various Morris Eaves
· Re: various Morris Eaves
· Re: various Mary G. Mckinley
· Re: various Morris Eaves
Z-gram Bob Essick answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Bob Essick
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Bob Essick
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Morris Eaves
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Bob Essick
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Morris Eaves
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Morris Eaves
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Bob Essick
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Bob Essick
· Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Bob Essick
Re: new books on test site Matt Kirschenbaum imagesizer (was: Re: new books on test site) Matt Kirschenbaum Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Joseph Viscomi Re: imagesizer (was: Re: new books on test site) Morris Eaves fitzwilliam update Joseph Viscomi recent requests Joseph Viscomi Z-gram Bob Essick Re: Copyright provisions (fwd) John Unsworth MHH copy F Matt Kirschenbaum Fw: NCC Washington Update, Vol 4, #19, May 20, 1998 (fwd) Morris Eaves Re: MHH copy F Matt Kirschenbaum blake-update buttons Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: blake-update buttons Morris Eaves
· Re: blake-update buttons Morris Eaves
Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Joseph Viscomi Re: Copyright provisions (fwd) Joseph Viscomi Re: Copyright provisions (fwd) Matt Kirschenbaum Re: answers and questions for Matt, followed by a Z-gram Joseph Viscomi lists of works Joseph Viscomi Re: blake-update buttons Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: blake-update buttons Joseph Viscomi
italics, copyright date, dangling notes Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: italics, copyright date, dangling notes Bob Essick
Re: blake-update buttons Matt Kirschenbaum work-flow update Bob Essick
· Re: work-flow update Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: work-flow update Joseph Viscomi
· Re: work-flow update Bob Essick
Z-gram: perhaps the last Bob Essick front end Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: front end Morris Eaves
· Re: front end Morris Eaves
· Re: front end Morris Eaves
· Re: front end Morris Eaves
· Re: front end Bob Essick
Re: front end Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: front end Joseph Viscomi
Re: front end Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: front end Joseph Viscomi
on copyright from today's CHE Matt Kirschenbaum Re: front end Joseph Viscomi Re: front end Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: front end Joseph Viscomi
image tracking sheet Joseph Viscomi imagesizer Matt Kirschenbaum things of Matt to do Bob Essick
· Re: things of Matt to do Matt Kirschenbaum
Re: image tracking sheet Matt Kirschenbaum bibliographic mania Bob Essick
· Re: bibliographic mania Morris Eaves
Fw: NCC Washington Update, Vol 4, #20, May 28, 1998 (fwd) Morris Eaves testing blake-proj Matt Kirschenbaum Romantic websites (fwd) Joseph Viscomi RE: Copyright provisions (fwd) The William Blake Archive Re: lists of works Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: lists of works Joseph Viscomi
Re: Copyright provisions (fwd) Morris Eaves Re: film stocks for info records (fwd) Joseph Viscomi Re: film stocks for info records (fwd) Joseph Viscomi contact info: Huntinton et al Joseph Viscomi
· Re: contact info: Huntinton et al Bob Essick
imagesizer update Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: imagesizer update Joseph Viscomi
Re: imagesizer update Joseph Viscomi Re: imagesizer update Matt Kirschenbaum FlashPix image format Matt Kirschenbaum Re: html contributors pages Joseph Viscomi nypl contact info Joseph Viscomi Re: IATH brochure images Morris Eaves Re: IATH brochure images Morris Eaves Re: IATH brochure images Matt Kirschenbaum Re: IATH brochure images Morris Eaves Re: film stocks for info records (fwd) Bob Essick test Robert N. Essick Songs of Innocence Robert N. Essick
· Re: Songs of Innocence Joseph Viscomi
Re: Songs of Innocence Robert N. Essick numbers Robert N. Essick
· Re: numbers Joseph Viscomi
· Re: numbers Bob Essick
· Re: numbers Morris Eaves
songs Z Robert N. Essick from Morton Paley (fwd) The William Blake Archive
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Joseph Viscomi
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Joseph Viscomi
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Bob Essick
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Bob Essick
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Bob Essick
Re: Copyright provisions (fwd) Matt Kirschenbaum testing nnr Joseph Viscomi Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Joseph Viscomi Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Joseph Viscomi
Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Joseph Viscomi Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: from Morton Paley (fwd) Joseph Viscomi
sgml and ip records for neh Joseph Viscomi brochure Joseph Viscomi
· Re: brochure Morris Eaves
wheat? Joseph Viscomi
· Re: wheat? Bob Essick
wheat in America pl. 11 Bob Essick Re: testing nnr Greg Murray Re: testing nnr Joseph Viscomi Re: testing nnr Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: testing nnr Greg Murray
Re: brochure Matt Kirschenbaum slides Matt Kirschenbaum
· Re: slides Joseph Viscomi
Re: testing nnr Joseph Viscomi urizen mark-up Robert N. Essick
<desc id="songsie.Z.P24" dbi="songsie.Z.P24">
<objtitle>
<title><hi rend="i">Songs of Innocence and of Experience</hi>, copy Z</title>,
<objid>
<objnumber code="A24">plate 24 </objnumber>
<objcode code="B24">(Bentley 24, </objcode>
<objcode code="E24">Erdman 24, </objcode>
<objcode code="K24">Keynes 24)</objcode>
</objid>
</objtitle>
<physdesc>
<compDate></compDate>
<printDate></printDate>
<objsize>11.5 x 7.8 cm.</objsize>
<paperSize></paperSize>
<medium></medium>
<printingStyle></printingStyle>
<inkColor></inkColor>
<watermark></watermark>
<etchedNumbers><value></value><location></location></etchedNumbers>
<pennedNumbers><value>24</value><location>top
right</location></pennedNumbers>
<framelines><value></value></framelines>
<stabHoles><number></number><location></location></stabHoles>
</physdesc>
<illusdesc>
<illustration type="plate" location="E">
<illusobjdesc>The sky in the margins and across the top of the plate tends to integrate the poem
into a single design, though the dense interlinear decoration resists such integration. At the bottom,
under the (lower?) limb of a tree with a few leaves, seven children-four boys and two, probably
three, girls--hold hands and play, or perhaps dance, in an incomplete circle. The two children
furthest left stretch something, perhaps a piece of cloth, between them. A matron-figure in cap
and gown, evidently the nurse of the title, sits on the ground against the trunk and reads a book in her
lap. To the right is a second tree, slimmer and more obviously leafy, with a vine around its lower
trunk. There are "hills" (line 12) in the background and shadows across the foreground. The sky
above the hills is colored to suggest sunset (line 5).</illusobjdesc>
<component type="figure" location="CD">
<characteristic>female</characteristic>
<characteristic>male</characteristic>
<characteristic>child</characteristic>
<characteristic>gown</characteristic>
<characteristic>tights</characteristic>
<characteristic>arms raised horizontally</characteristic>
<characteristic>arms raised at 135 degrees</characteristic>
<characteristic>hand holding</characteristic>
<characteristic>holding</characteristic>
<characteristic>playing</characteristic>
<characteristic>dancing</characteristic>
<characteristic>hat</characteristic>
<characteristic>running</characteristic>
<characteristic>facing left</characteristic>
<characteristic>facing forward</characteristic>
<characteristic>facing away</characteristic>
<characteristic>seen from behind</characteristic>
<characteristic>striding</characteristic>
<characteristic>standing</characteristic>
<characteristic>leg extended backward</characteristic>
<characteristic>legs spread</characteristic>
<characteristic>long hair</characteristic>
<characteristic>short hair</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>Seven children hold hands and play vigorously, or perhaps dance, in an incomplete
circle. Clockwise from the left: The two children furthest left (a girl[?] and a short-haired boy)
stretch something, perhaps a piece of cloth used in a game, between them; a girl (perhaps wearing
a hat) raises her arms horizontally and faces right with legs outspread; a boy raises his arms
higher, as does the long-haired girl to the right of him, whose leg is extended behind her; holding
her hand, a boy runs left and reaches forward to hold the hand of another running or striding boy,
left leg extended behind him, who raises his free left hand as he moves left and back, perhaps
toward the opening between the pair furthest left. All the girls have on gowns; all the boys wear
tight-fitting garments. These are the "little ones" who "leaped & shouted & laugh'd" (line 15) and
remonstrate with the nurse in the poem.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="figure" location="C">
<characteristic>female</characteristic>
<characteristic>nurse</characteristic>
<characteristic>gown</characteristic>
<characteristic>cap</characteristic>
<characteristic>sitting</characteristic>
<characteristic>reading</characteristic>
<characteristic>holding</characteristic>
<characteristic>lap</characteristic>
<characteristic>arms on lap</characteristic>
<characteristic>facing right</characteristic>
<characteristic>head down</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>Facing right, a matron-figure in cap and gown, evidently the nurse of the title who
remonstrates with the children of the poem, sits on the ground or a low seat against the trunk of a
tree and reads a book that she holds in her lap.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="vegetation" location="CD">
<characteristic>tree</characteristic>
<characteristic>leaf</characteristic>
<characteristic>branch</characteristic>
<characteristic>vine</characteristic>
<characteristic>climbing</characteristic>
<characteristic>grass</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>On the left is the trunk of a tree whose lowermost branch, with a few leaves-the
only limb visible-spreads over the nurse who sits at the base of its trunk. On the right is a second
tree, slimmer, with more leafy branches visible and a vine climbing up its trunk. Between the
trees is "the green" of line 1.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="object" location="CD">
<characteristic>hill</characteristic>
<characteristic>sunset</characteristic>
<characteristic>shadow</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>There are "hills" (line 12) in the background, shadows across the foreground. The
colors of the sky just above the hills suggest that the time is dusk, as indicated in the text (line
5).</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="object" location="C">
<characteristic>book</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>The nurse reads a book that she holds in her lap.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="object" location="E">
<characteristic>sky</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>The sky in the margins and across the top of the plate tends to integrate the poem
into a single design.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
</illustration>
<illustration type="interlinear" location="E">
<illusobjdesc>On this plate the interlinear designs are especially dense around the title, in the
margins, and between the three stanzas. The title area is full of vegetative swirls, curls, and loops,
much of it associated with the extravagant extensions of three letters, the initial capitals "N" and
"S" and the terminal "g." Several are colored to suggest long, slender leaves (the descender on
the "g," for instance), and there are three other prominent leafy formations in this area: one at the top
of the "S," another growing from the "N" of "Nurse's," and the third in the top left corner. Some
of the loopy, vine-like decoration dangles in the left margin, and a large leafy structure occupies
the space at the end of short line 4. Below it is a leafy weeping willow tree that leans right; its
branches arch down into the sky/water. Between stanzas (after lines 4, 8, and 12) and, in the right
margin, at the ends of short lines are other vinelike structures. The initial letters of stanzas 2, 3,
and 4 have extensions that add to the decoration in the left margin. Several human figures
populate the network of interlinear vegetation: two on the "N" of "Nurse's," climbing the left stroke and
sitting in a curl at the top of the right stroke; one reaching downward through the following "u,"
joining hands with another who reaches up from below; one leaning against the "S" of "Song";
two beneath "Song" on the long horizontal descender of the "g"; one reclining on the bit of vegetation
at the end of line 2 and another(?) on the leafy structure at the end of line 4. Between the lines there
are a few birdlike shapes.</illusobjdesc>
<component type="figure" location="AB">
<characteristic>nude</characteristic>
<characteristic>climbing</characteristic>
<characteristic>hovering</characteristic>
<characteristic>reaching</characteristic>
<characteristic>hand holding</characteristic>
<characteristic>sitting</characteristic>
<characteristic>leaning</characteristic>
<characteristic>leg drawn up</characteristic>
<characteristic>reclining</characteristic>
<characteristic>straddling</characteristic>
<characteristic>arm extended</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>Several human figures populate the network of interlinear vegetation. Clockwise
from top left: two on the "N" of "Nurse's," one (nude?) climbing the left stroke and the other
sitting, facing right, in a curl at the top of the right stroke; one hovering in the following "u,"
reaching downward and joining hands with another who reaches up from below, where he/she is
seated, facing left, on the end of the long horizontal descender of the "g"; one facing left and
leaning, with one leg drawn up, against the "S" of "Song"; further up on that same descender, two
reclining, the one on the left straddling the vegetation; one, arm raised, reclining on the bit of
vegetation at the end of line 2 and another(?) on the leafy structure at the end of line
4.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="animal" location="CD">
<characteristic>bird</characteristic>
<characteristic>flying</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>There are two birdlike shapes above "for it is" in line 9 and another above "hills" in
the last line.</illusobjdesc>
</component>
<component type="vegetation" location="E">
<characteristic>vine</characteristic>
<characteristic>leaf</characteristic>
<characteristic>loop</characteristic>
<characteristic>willow</characteristic>
<characteristic>tree</characteristic>
<characteristic>arching</characteristic>
<illusobjdesc>The title area is full of vegetative swirls, curls, and loops, much of it associated
with the extravagant extensions of three letters, the initial capitals "N" and "S" and the terminal "g."
Several are colored to suggest long, slender leaves (the descender on the "g," for instance), and
there are three other prominent leafy formations in this area: one at the top of the "S," another
growing from the "N" of "Nurse's," and the third in the top left corner. Some of the loopy, vine-
like decoration dangles in the left margin, and a large leafy structure occupies the space at the end
of short line 4. Below it is a leafy weeping willow tree that leans right; its branches arch down
into the sky/water. Between stanzas (after lines 4, 8, and 12) and, in the right margin, at the ends of
short lines are other vine-like structures. The initial letters of stanzas 2, 3, and 4 have extensions
that add to the decoration in the left margin. </illusobjdesc>
</component>
</illustration>
</illusdesc>
<phystext>
<texthead><l justify="center">Nurse's Song</l></texthead>
<lg type="verse">
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.01">When the voices of children are heard on the green</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.02">And laughing is heard on the hill,</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.03">My heart is at rest within my breast</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.04">And every thing else is still</l>
</lg>
<lg type="verse">
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.05">Then come home my children, the sun is gone down</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.06">And the dews of night arise</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.07">Come come leave off play, and let us away</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.08">Till the morning appears in the skies</l>
</lg>
<lg type="verse">
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.09">No no let us play, for it is yet day</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.10">And we cannot go to sleep</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.11">Besides in the sky, the little birds fly</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.12">And the hills are all coverd with sheep</l>
</lg>
<lg type="verse">
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.13">Well well go & play till the light fades away</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.14">And then go home to bed</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.15">The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd</l>
<l n="songsie.Z.p24.16">And all the hills ecchoed</l>
</lg>
</phystext>
<navnode>
<navline><ptr type="A"></navline>
<navline><ptr type="B"></navline>
<navline><ptr type="C"></navline>
<navline><ptr type="D"></navline>
<navtable>
<navrow>
<naventry><ptr type="E"></naventry>
<naventry><ptr type="F"></naventry>
<naventry><ptr type="G"></naventry>
</navrow>
</navtable>
</navnode>
</desc>