Blake
Unbound
story by
Julia
Bryan
With
scanners and computers, scholars are reuniting
the poet and the graphic artist, so that the
unabridged brilliance
of Blake is ready at your fingertips—online.
Nineteenth-century print limitations
helped define William Blake as a writer. Modern
technology is redefining him as a multimedia
artist.
Most of us know
Blake (1757-1827) as a poet, the author of
"The Tyger" and "The Lamb."
We read his poems as children and rediscover them
again in college. But the poems we read are what
Joseph Viscomi, professor of English and
co-editor of the William Blake Archive, calls
"translations." They're lifted from
their original settings, removed from their
illustrated format. For Blake didn't just write
verse, he combined his visual and verbal talents
into one medium—the illuminated print.
In the late
1780s, Blake began exploring ways to publish his
own work. A trained printer, he already had the
equipment and experience. But he wanted to move
beyond letterpress printing—which uses set
type—toward a format all his own. He came up
with a technique called "relief
etching." Using quill pens and
acid-resistant ink, he wrote his poetry onto
copper plates and added illustrations to
complement the text. Then he put the plates in an
acid bath that etched away any surface not
covered with ink. After printing from the plates,
Blake and his wife hand-colored the pages and
sewed them together into what he called
"illuminated books."
In Blake's
books, it is difficult to say where the poet
leaves off and the visual artist begins. But when
the Victorians rediscovered Blake in the
mid-nineteenth century, they had no way to
reprint the books as originally
produced—photographic reproduction hadn't
been invented yet. Blake's art was put aside, his
poetry "translated" into type, and he
became famous as a poet.
Promoting a
re-evaluation of Blake's art has become a mission
of sorts for Joseph Viscomi. He became interested
in Blake while working as a curatorial assistant
in prints and drawings while a graduate student
at Columbia. At the same time, he printed his own
etchings and relief etchings. He says, "I
approached Blake from the back door, the
studio." Blake's print techniques fascinated
Viscomi, and he eventually published Blake and
the Idea of the Book, an in-depth exploration
of those methods.
Viscomi's work
with Blake's prints led him to become an editor
of a set of Blake books co-produced by the
William Blake Trust and the Tate Gallery. These
volumes reproduced the poetry's original format
as closely as possible, keeping the images true
to size and the colors accurate. But such a set
was expensive to print. Says Viscomi, "The
facsimiles could only include one copy from each
book and a few supplementary illustrations."
In the midst of the project, Viscomi and his
co-editors, Morris Eaves and Robert Essick,
realized that they were creating a beautiful
research tool, with limitations. They decided to
take what Viscomi calls "the next step"
and create a digital archive of all of Blake's
works that would, theoretically, be able to
present not just one copy, but all available
copies of a text, unrestrained by the limitations
of print.
The trio
approached the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities at the University of
Virginia with the project and received an
enthusiastic go-ahead. The Institute saw the
Blake archive as an opportunity not only to
preserve fragile manuscripts but also as a means
to develop and test tools for use in future
archives.
Being a guinea
pig has not been easy, Viscomi admits, but it has
been exciting. He says, "On good days, you
feel like you're solving new problems. On bad
days it's frustrating because there's nothing to
look back at and say, `oh, that's how they did
that.'"
Although
creating a digital archive is more affordable
than a collection of printed facsimiles, it is
still time consuming. After Viscomi convinced the
Library of Congress to lend the archive
their Blake collection, he spent days in the
library's rare book room taking film
transparencies of each page with a photographer.
Each morning, Viscomi received the transparencies
from the previous day's shoot and checked their
accuracy against the original prints. His earlier
work as a printer came in handy then—he
already had a trained eye capable of picking up
tiny discrepancies that would invalidate the
film.
Later, the
transparencies were scanned into digital files
and color-corrected. The images and text were
then "tagged" in SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language), which makes it possible for
viewers to search throughout the archive for
words and visual motifs. As well, visitors can
view enlargements of the plates. Says Viscomi,
"That's helpful for an editor who needs to
go into a text and look at punctuation and words
and tell if something is touched up or not, if it
was added by Blake or by someone else."
The Blake
editors have worked hard to make the archive
user-friendly. Each window has a marker that
reminds viewers where they are. The design
ensures that the archive is easy to use for even
the most book-bound researcher. At the same time,
though, Viscomi knows that the archive might
leave out people with slow machines and small
monitors. He says, "We had to balance
current equipment with where we expect to be two
years from now. Are we designing for laptops and
modems? If we scan at too low a resolution, the
images lose their fidelity." Ultimately, the
editors decided not to sacrifice detail for
smaller files.
The editors
plan to continue to add to the archive's
collection of illuminated texts into the next
year. By the end of the summer of 1998, Viscomi
hopes to have at least one copy of each
illuminated book online.
"Blake
worried that artists and poets who could not
reproduce themselves lost out," Viscomi
says. "So he created his own form of
publication and advertised it as a method that
`combines the Painter and the Poet.'"
Two hundred
years later, the art world has finally caught up
with Blake—through the internet.
Visit the
William Blake Archive online at http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/blake
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