ILLUMINATING BLAKE
The Blake Archives
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake/

Two hundred years ago the illuminated books of visionary English poet
and printmaker William Blake were the "new media" art of their day. Not
only did Blake exploit the possibilities of the then new technologies of
lithography and steel engraving to create highly original combinations
of image and text but he also used these machine technologies in
conjunction with custom-blended inks and hand-painted watercolor. In
addition, throughout his career he experimented with what we would think
of now as hypermedia by issuing the same "book" assembled in alternative
versions with the plates in differing orders. The result was that there
could never be one standard edition of, say, his "Songs of Innocence,"
only a number of manifestations that all could be considered–both
individually and as a whole–the original book.

Needless to say Blake's working methods make for highly complex hybrid
objects that defy categorization and make the use of traditional textual
studies extremely frustrating, if not impossible. Blake isn't a poet who
illustrated his words but a true multimedia artist who designed, wrote,
etched, printed and colored the books himself. As such his work stands
at the intersection between the tradition of illuminated manuscripts
reaching back to the Middle Ages and the dawn of the machine age and
resonates with our own concerns today as we enter what some are calling
"the digital age."

Due to the limitations of print technology to effectively reproduce
multiple media in the past Blake has often been considered mainly as a
poet even though he was primarily a visual artist by trade and produced
a great number of paintings and drawings. Any consideration of Blake's
work would be incomplete without including as much of his image
production as possible with all their variations. From of the 19
individual books Blake himself produced about 175 unique copies and
about 20% of those have been reproduced in print with varying degrees of
success. Attempts by the Blake Trust in London to publish a definitive
volume that would be both lavishly illustrated and at the same time
useful to scholars proved highly problematic.

Eventually it became evident that a digital electronic archive was a
better solution and starting in 1995 the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (IATH) and
the Getty Grant Program have supported the production of The Blake
Archive to take advantage of advances in digital technology to produce
an electronic archive based on the books that would be supplemented by
his paintings, drawing and commercial illustrations. Their goal is to
offer high-quality reproductions in ways that will enhance
interdisciplinary understanding of the work.

Working closely together the IATH and outside researchers are scanning
images from about 55 key copies of the 19 illuminated books that will,
for the first time, form a suitable archive for serious research and
promote a better understanding of Blake's work as a whole. As a result
of new research already made possible by this project previously
neglected copies of the books have been re-evaluated in light of new
understanding of Blake's working methods. For example, it is now
possible for scholars to compare what was etched on the plate and what
was added or changed afterwards in printing and coloring the
impressions. Previous reproductions couldn't offer enough detail and the
original objects were impossible to compare since they were housed in
widely dispersed locations. The digital reproductions of the archive can
be searched, enlarged, enhanced and juxtaposed to investigate features
that were previously imperceptible in reproduction.

When complete the archive will contain approximately 3000 images
searchable by both text and image and offer annotation tools developed
at the IATH to enable users to construct a kind of visual concordance by
creating pathways within and across different media. The result will
take the form of a portable archival edition of the books on CD-ROM as
well as this Web site.

The Web site itself is exemplary in it's economic use of hypertext and
images. Little bandwidth is wasted on unnecessary design elements so
download time is devoted to the images themselves (which load remarkable
fast anyway) yet the site is extremely easy to understand and navigate.
Users have a choice of using a version with various Java-based
enhancements (image-annotation software, search histories) or a
less-flexible non-Java version that draw on the same underlying
materials but use two methods of presentation.

As of the end of last year the main research and development phase of
the project has been completed and it now contains two smaller books
that are fully operable. The plan is to move into full-scale production
now that major technical issues have been addressed with the goal of
making one copy of each book available by summer 1998. The complete
on-line edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake will be released in the spring.