Digital facsimiles: Reading the William Blake archive

Language Resources and Evaluation

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 27-48

  Viscomi, Joseph ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52649103080     PISSN: 1574020X     EISSN: 15728412     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Grant, John E. and Mary Lynn, Johnson, eds., Blake's Poetry and Designs. Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton, New York, 1979, pp. 49-50.
2. According to Professor Paul Zall, who examined all editions of Granger's Index to Poetry, Blake's "Tyger" was the most anthologized poem.
3. See, for example, Jerome McGann's Black Riders, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1993
4. Textual Condition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1991,
5. Joseph Viscomi's Blake and the Idea of the Book, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1993.
6. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings. 1966. Repr. with corrections, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, pp. 214.
7. Erdman, David V., ed. With Commentary by Harold Bloom. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. 1965. Rev. ed., University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988, pp. 24-25.
8. Rule of thumb: reproductions get reproduced. Scholars will reproduce images they know through reproductions, and, for economic reasons, prefer to acquire negatives or transparencies on file than to incur new photography costs. The Archive addresses this problem by greatly enlarging the pool of reproductions, clearly identifying the image's owner institution or collection, and informing users how to acquire permission to reproduce.
9. Only in the past six years, largely as a result of the Archive's editors' 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.
10. We must recognize, though, 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. In 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.
11. Current versions of Microtek's ScanWizard software (3.1.2) are used with the Microtek scanners; 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 Power PC; the Microtek Scanmaker V is attached to a Macintosh G3; the Microtek 35t Plus is attached to a Macintosh G3. All three Macs run OS 8.1.
12. Unsharp mask is a film compositing technique used to sharpen edges on an image. It corrects blurring in the original source and compensates for blurring that occurs in sampling and printing processes. It is recommended whether output will be print or online, though the sharpening effect is more pronounced in online image (on-screen) than in high-resolution output (print). The unsharp mask filter locates every two adjacent pixels with a difference in brightness values that you specify and then increases the pixels' contrast by the amount you specify. You also specify the number of surrounding pixels to which the sharpening effect is applied.
13. The image (America plate 13) reproduced is 23.7 x 17.2 cm, input size (the image on the transparency) is 10.2 x 7.4 cm, and scaling is 231%, producing an output of 23.7 x 17.2 cm and a 22.7 MB TIFF and a 1.8 MB JPEG. The slide, also scanned at 300dpi, but with an input size of only 2.7 x 2.0 cm, requires a scaling of 860% to make an output of 23.7 x 17.3 cm, a 23.2 MB TIFF and a 1.5 MB JPEG. The slide scanned at 72 dpi, same scaling, produces a 1.3 MB TIFF and a 323k JPEG.
14. For signatures, see Viscomi, Joseph, "A Breach in a City, the Morning After the Battle: Lost or Found?" Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (Fall, 1994), pp. 50-53.
15. McGann's demonstration of "deformation" was presented as part of the session chaired by Matthew Kirschenbaum, "Redefining Our Notions of What (Digital) Images Really Are," Association for Computers in the Humanities/Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, joint international conference, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., 6/10/99.