The William Blake Archive
Joe Viscomi, director and co-editor of the William Blake Archive, in the Archive’s main office, 504 Greenlaw Hall, working on Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy F, plate 3, image, transcription, and editorial notes.
Wilson Library, Pleasants Family Assembly Room
Tuesday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Wednesday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Thursday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Project Team
Joseph Viscomi, editor, UNC, James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English
Robert Essick, editor, University of California, Riverside, professor emeritus
Morris Eaves, editor, University of Rochester
Will Shaw, technical editor, UNC graduate student
Ashley Reed, project manager, UNC graduate student
Project Note
While most CHAT projects are original to and created for the festival, this project has been underway for a number of years. During the festival, Viscomi and editorial assistants will demonstrate the Archive and its various workflows in the Pleasants Assembly Room in Wilson Library.
Project Description
The Blake Archive was conceived in 1993 by three of Blake studies’ most prominent scholars and editors. A free site on the Web since 1996, the Blake Archive is an international public resource that provides 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.
Through intensive collaboration, initially between the editors and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia and now between the editors and the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA) at UNC, the Archive has been able to achieve exceptionally high standards of site construction, digital representation and electronic editing that are 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. It supplies 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.
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 the editors have designed the Archive to serve scholars and the general public within the limits of existing systems, they have built in considerable allowance for future improvements in hardware and software.
The hypermedia Archive is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Past support was provided by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems and Inso Corporation.
The Blake Archive became the first electronic scholarly edition to receive the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition (2003) and to receive the Approved Edition seal from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions (2005).
Currently, 27 institutions, housing all the major Blake collections in the world, have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees; among them the British Library, British Museum, Tate Britain, Fitzwilliam Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, NY Public Library, Harvard University, Fogg Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum, Yale Center for British Art, National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress.
The structure and rationale of the Archive grew out of Viscomi’s earlier editing projects for the Blake Trust (vols. 3 and 5 of William Blake's Illuminated Books, Tate Gallery/Princeton U. P, 1993) and his Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton UP, 1993). Viscomi continues to examine the various ways in which Blake's techniques and theories of art figure into his poetry and designs, and to examine the development of watercolor painting, print technology, and lyrical poetry in the Romantic period, focusing on works by major and minor figures, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Turner, Constable, Cozens, and Gilpin.
Tuesday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Wednesday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Thursday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Project Team
Joseph Viscomi, editor, UNC, James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English
Robert Essick, editor, University of California, Riverside, professor emeritus
Morris Eaves, editor, University of Rochester
Will Shaw, technical editor, UNC graduate student
Ashley Reed, project manager, UNC graduate student
Project Note
While most CHAT projects are original to and created for the festival, this project has been underway for a number of years. During the festival, Viscomi and editorial assistants will demonstrate the Archive and its various workflows in the Pleasants Assembly Room in Wilson Library.
Project Description
The Blake Archive was conceived in 1993 by three of Blake studies’ most prominent scholars and editors. A free site on the Web since 1996, the Blake Archive is an international public resource that provides 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.
Through intensive collaboration, initially between the editors and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia and now between the editors and the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA) at UNC, the Archive has been able to achieve exceptionally high standards of site construction, digital representation and electronic editing that are 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. It supplies 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.
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 the editors have designed the Archive to serve scholars and the general public within the limits of existing systems, they have built in considerable allowance for future improvements in hardware and software.
The hypermedia Archive is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Past support was provided by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems and Inso Corporation.
The Blake Archive became the first electronic scholarly edition to receive the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition (2003) and to receive the Approved Edition seal from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions (2005).
Currently, 27 institutions, housing all the major Blake collections in the world, have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees; among them the British Library, British Museum, Tate Britain, Fitzwilliam Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, NY Public Library, Harvard University, Fogg Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum, Yale Center for British Art, National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress.
The structure and rationale of the Archive grew out of Viscomi’s earlier editing projects for the Blake Trust (vols. 3 and 5 of William Blake's Illuminated Books, Tate Gallery/Princeton U. P, 1993) and his Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton UP, 1993). Viscomi continues to examine the various ways in which Blake's techniques and theories of art figure into his poetry and designs, and to examine the development of watercolor painting, print technology, and lyrical poetry in the Romantic period, focusing on works by major and minor figures, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Turner, Constable, Cozens, and Gilpin.
