Author Archives: Chloe Macias

The William Blake Digital Archive: Limitation into Prospect

The William Blake Digital Archive: 

http://www.blakearchive.org/

     The William Blake Archive sets out to compartmentalize and make easily accessible the wide variety of material under its collections central figure, William Blake. As a poet, painter and printmaker, the site makes use on the home screen of visual imagery, remediating in its interface a randomized assortment of Blake’s paintings to scratch the surface of his artistic range. The project’s most apparent ambition is managing to encapsulate the multi-faceted pursuits and characterizations of Blake and translate that in a more easily digestible format. 

Biography: 

http://www.blakearchive.org/exhibit/biography

     The unique and interactive biographical “exhibition” by Denise Vultee for background context is one that again utilizes visual imagery alongside an essay (text) rife with citation in the form of footnotes with attached images. Combining the consideration of the writer in their use of citation (the least amount of interruption for maximum textual engagement) along with remediation and the reinvention of the essays, the split screen format of William Blake’s biographical information reimagines the exhibition in a digital platform unlike that of online museum catalogues. I found that I was able to immerse myself especially with the journey through outlined periods in his career that transitioned and bled into one another rather than being separately distinguished or isolated through compartmentalization. 

     Summed up through the quotation, “Blake’s creative activities were not confined …. during these years”, the site consolidates this concept throughout its digital environment. One such important highlight is how his endeavors, particularly in his work on illuminated printing and illustrated books, constantly exposed him to various ideologies and more politically driven authors and works whose intentions coincided with slavery, poverty and various other radical issues in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; all of which, he would later integrate into his own Classical-centric body of work. The same format applies to the archive’s other reworked exhibitions, which demonstrate the same intention of simultaneous gallery and essay cooperation—elaborating more on Blake’s venture through the technical aspects of the engraving process (“Illuminated Painting by Joseph Viscomi”) and a case study on Blake’s engraving and painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims (“William Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims”). 

“William Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims”: 

http://www.blakearchive.org/exhibit/canterburypilgrims

     The archival exhibition, “William Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims”, uniquely chronicles Canterbury Pilgrims while positing the concept of originality and ownership, offering rival contention and comparison between Blake’s rendition and Thomas Stodhard’s The Pilgrimage to Canterbury, each of whom attempt to fully claim authorship of the scene and its iconography. This includes organized lists of hyperlinks that interject the text labeled under figures specific in either painting for reference and juxtaposition (Blake’s Pilgrims and Selected Figures and The Pilgrims Compared). 

     What struck me most was the end selection of critical comments and reviews contemporary to the time, chronicling excerpts of reception regarding both paintings. These offer avenues of research that focus more on sociological and political viewpoints on aesthetics in the English art scene, some of which were involved in museum curation. Also to note is the layered consultation of primary, secondary and tertiary sources apparent through the overview. 

“Illuminated Painting by Joseph Viscomi”: http://www.blakearchive.org/exhibit/illuminatedprinting

     Exemplifying a more technical analysis on processes and technique, “Illuminated Painting by Joseph Viscomi” is an exhibition that takes on the agenda of textual criticism by delving into material and the advancements of printing technology in their effect on Blake and his Romantic approach. 

     Through adaptation and arguably innovation, Blake developed his own methodology reminiscent of all his interests (painting, poetry and printmaking) and so the exhibition carries from the beginnings of the plate to the developed book. Specifically, I enjoyed and wished for more small interjections regarding other participants like that of his wife in his process, whose collaborative labors are often hidden. The same can be said for the economic and labor-specific realities introduced in the conclusion and more assumptive in the reader’s knowledge on literature and book distribution in this period. 

Blog: 

https://blog.blakearchive.org/

David Erdman’s publication, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, on the collection:

http://erdman.blakearchive.org/

Further Research:

http://www.blakearchive.org/staticpage/generalbib

     For behind-the-scenes and modern introspective, the site offers tabs on the front page labeled Blog, Erdman, and further down Resources for Further Research. These overviews on the site’s construction, its repository of associated works, and collection aid in navigating the narrative woven through The William Blake Archive. Even more so does it encourage others to participate and actively add upon the self-acknowledged incompleteness of the research and archive. 

     While David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake veers a bit on the daunting side for newly introduced individuals on this academia, the site itself establishes enough to make this more packed interpretation and contained edition accessible for those wanting to focus their own scope or questions regarding William Blake. While this edition is made accessible, one thing to note is its newest revision is in 1988 and omits electronically some of the content in the physical copy. It thus remains apparent that archival itself retains obsolescence as a persistent question in doing so. 

Issue Archive: http://bq.blakearchive.org/

Current Issues: 

https://blakequarterly.org/index.php/blake

     The site also archives modern academia and research that preceded the site in its digital format. Peer reviewed articles and established criteria help to foster a community with this particular interest in Blake, but at the same time also demonstrate flexibility as it adapts to the expanding definition of academia. The stakes and responsibility that come from this establishment of “trust” and reputation then adhere to much of the acceptance and choice of showcased research and articles.

What’s New?

http://www.blakearchive.org/staticpage/update

     The mindfulness apparent in all of the features in the William Blake archive demonstrate that the archive as a work in progress is still cycling through becoming more and more efficient. While this strive for efficiency does not always allow for success, this digital project highlights the value of error and process. While not everything can be covered or touched upon, digital impermanence paves the way much like academia is now doing—questioning and delving into the continuous remediation of information.

The Prospect and Flexibility of Electronic Publication

     The risk and stakes one takes in academia is the acknowledgement that we are containing and ultimately preserving knowledge in some form. Archives up until the digital era were facilitated mostly by academic institutions and even now are largely in part shaped through grants and funding. Yet editors are now slowly accounting for how the collection of text is relevant on all levels, even in those that are not considered scholarly. The hegemony of the editing and publishing process then becomes apparent in studies on intention in textual criticism, especially in variants and editions. 

     What I find most interesting is the now economically manageable manipulation of text using digital tools of copy and paste, superimposing, tagging (quintessential to accessibility and filtering for researchers) and more. While new problems manifest as we adapt these tools to academic pursuits, they are equally important in evolving techniques, practices and approaches to formatting preservation. In this same vein, the possibility opened by these new manipulations escape the rigors of academic editing and its downfall through selectiveness. Sources outside the scholarly offer historical and contextual assets pivotal to an editor’s collection and amassing as well of material to then publish. 

     Paraphrasing Ken Price in “Electronic Scholarly Editions”, database and narrative although enemies, are both relevant in preservation as neutrality occurs outside bias and exclusivity, something of which academia constantly struggles with. Then we are presented with the concept of collaboration and how it can facilitate a greater understanding and approach to these shortcomings. Erasure of collaboration, I find, is intrinsically tied to the difficulties in evaluating and problematizing the processes of publishing now. Of course, text and work must go through some time of peer review and credibility when being collected as to ascertain how valuable this will be to the wide audience. 

     What I see as the most crucial and continuously mentioned aspect of editing is then its flexibility. To fulfill in a sense the act of recording, we are made accountable to how this form of preservation will be accessible. Electronic scholarly endeavors have themselves been shaped by technology, but also shaped the technology. This mutual relationship lends itself to how we can revitalize the archive, exceeding its materiality and many deaths. Achille Mbembe in “The Power of Archive and Its Limits” shows the institutionalization of archives and the inability of those to be separated. What projects like Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities alternatively depict is textual criticism under the lens of many in different fields and professions, already exceeding previous limitations before going electronic. 

     While narratives constructed by archives and databases alike still exist, the recognition of their contextual relevance but also inherent lessons can only further improve and facilitate greater efforts in textual criticism and the editing process. Editing while sometimes a quiet and invisible process, has equally important stakes in the publication process and academia as a whole. So long as we utilize its ability to be understood and built upon, the foundations of knowledge will remain sustainable and accessible to an ever increasing audience despite the crossover to the digital. 

“Electronic Scholarly Editions” in the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Study, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 434-50.

Achille Mbembe. “The Power of Archive and its Limits” (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002).

Interdisciplinary Academics and the Relevance of Theses

     In the efforts of the academic, I find that the purpose of citation is central to what our work should reflect: the ease in introducing research to the reader. This means allotting room for the reader to refer, further investigate and seek knowledge based on their interests (think Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s filtering process for reward). For the 2017 thesis, “The Column of Constantine at Constantinople: A Cultural History (330-1453 C.E.)” by Carey Thompson Wells, it consolidates and compartmentalizes information chronologically while retaining its modern argument and introspection throughout. 

     The project’s form is streamlined in conveying a progression of the Column of Constantine’s symbolism as a product of political agendas and visions of power. The audience can then clearly correlate and find commonality among the many historical successors of the column, its surrounding land and their tactics in regards to assimilation. Concepts like reified meaning based on Hegel’s theory of sublation (Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s “Remediations”) are reinforced constantly. The overarching historical and cultural points made also had relevance in the ways we conduct and approach research, hitting on how the source can be directly affected by what it derives from (attitudes and intentions bleeding into the author’s). Overall, these strengthened the reliability of the project and positively influenced its presentation and reception. 

      The footnotes and excerpts also were seamlessly integrated to maximize the fluidity of the text, keeping the reader’s engagement. Consistency in the citation made it easy for me to trace and overview patterns throughout the thesis as well as manage to think tangentially about other points of research one could take. To note too was the unique division of primary and secondary sources as well as website articles and images in the bibliography. The references never detracted from the argument, rather the author questioned and added possible counter-arguments. This multiplicity of truth served again to give the reading more impact. This also has made room for conversation, leaving this discussion (and the many others it introduces) open-ended. 

     Wells most masterful inclusion was highlighting the modern relevance, bringing up the idea of predominant Western culture and how erasure occurs in this context. The creation of myths and how political agendas revitalize certain ideas as well made this project all the more pertinent to avenues or art historical, archaeological, anthropological and purely historical research methods. This then interdisciplinary inclusiveness, through terminology and approach, manifests this thesis’ application to any and all manners of discourse.

The Process and the Processor

     The digital age and technologies, while eliminating issues of the past, present their own shortcomings. When I write, it is me against the threshold of anxieties that come from the daunting blank canvas. Contrary to Barry B. Longyear, “the word processor as an extension of the mind” seems exaggerated; instead, the pressures of error and revision intrinsic in development and the creative process become somewhat invisible through the word processor (Track Changes, 109). 

     The seamless appearance of the first draft cannot account for the revisions I go through mentally, rather merely translate the end result of my inner turmoils. Error and mistakes (messy markings and imperfections) then that exemplified labor and parts of the composition process became less prevalent as a place to work from. So much as the personal computer now offers convenience and infinite possibility to type (a translation of writing), so too does it merit apprehension and conformity. It is when I compose that I find myself becoming a self-editor: my process as a reflection of the logistic and modulated ways that I type. A similar question is raised by Tony Bennett’s The Exhibitionary Complex through his theory on the museum as a space for visions of dominant power: a site, where you are seeing while being seen which perpetuates self-regulation. It is then that I find myself daunted equally by institutions and the space their works inhabit, the place where I publish encasing all of this anxiety as well. 

     But is this purely negative? My writing and composition process has undergone processes itself. The rapid transitions in technology for the past two decades have challenged my ability to adapt and integrate a vast multitude of methods in my writing. Though I wage battles with what I find true to my interests, idealization can pervade my organization of thoughts on paper and prevents me from tackling them head on– erasing rather than improving. In the same way, disciplines and institutions can immobilize us through restriction and specificity in its formatting and expectations. Whether I and others choose to adhere to them then is an entirely different matter and veers into the territory of responsibility.   

     What enables and disables me then is my connection to process and the product and what that entails. Just as Kathleen Fitzpatrick previously alluded to in her chapter Authorship, perfectionism is an illusion that can have individuals lose focus on development and the way identity intervenes in the creative process in all its iterations. As Track Changes also posits, I sometimes separate from my labor so much that I struggle to find my identity and presence in the spaces I occupy academically, mainly by working off products of writing rather than their more informative processes. But through this awareness, I can begin to work at self-improvement by seeing how error is intrinsic tied to process; how the word processor may mask these and appear complete, but is also only a step in the multitude of processes that writing must undergo.

Value, Reading and the Book: From Society to Print and Back

     Concluding with the documentary The Machine that Made Us, I found Stephen Fry’s final thoughts on print and the modern age quite perplexing; it was how he could not perceive modern society without the printed word. I find that I agree with this notion, but in a different manner: I instead see that the book and society have and still continuously shape each other. While an idea as text can die as pure intention in the mind of the author, the book must take on the weight of society in order to navigate the processes of transmission. At the other end of the spectrum, society can foster books as “building blocks of civilization” in order to construct itself and its collective consciousness.

     But while Gutenberg’s printing press universalized text and its ideas, the book in its respect to society can also be at its mercy. What I found especially interesting was just how much the process of textual transmission is social and the extent to which it is affected economically, politically and culturally (which Sarah Werner reflects upon in her final remarks). While I see that the book and reading have made bounds in terms of accessibility, the fact remains that the book’s physicality limits the terms of its distribution and development. As Abbott & Williams ascertain, the text is inherently tied to history, its makers and its circumstances.

     Similarly, the ascription of value by society is reflected in the analysis of the process of print. Just as printing was and is a process of transmission, so is reading within and out of the context of printing. As I and others read, we unconsciously enact our values on books and the way we funnel their information. Alterations and versions of a book through active participants in the publication process showcase this and perpetuate how the distinction between author and reader can blur (reference Abbott & Williams intricate “text to” web diagrams).

     I find then that the most we can draw from the history of print is has and still provides a network of interpretation, showcasing that text in its transmission to the format of books will always be subject to change. What has newly developed however is a breakdown of what dictates value as it becomes more decentralized in the advent of the digital age. It is the unanticipated extent of radicalization to tradition then that I believe print and later processes of distribution invited to society’s relationship to books, especially reading and the context with which we now view history. How this has and will affect us though will continue to evolve over time, remaining as fluid and subject to change as society is.