Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 428.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 06:54:32 +0000
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk@pop.uky.edu>
Subject: Electronic Erdman edition
21 February 2000
The editors of the William Blake Archive
<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake/> are very pleased to announce the
publication of our searchable SGML-encoded electronic edition of David
V. Erdman's _Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake_. The addition
of the electronic Erdman means that the site is now inclusive of an
even greater range of Blake's work than the approximately 3000 digital
images that will eventually form the structured core of the Archive
proper. Based upon the text of the 1988 Newly Revised Doubleday
Edition, the electronic Erdman represents almost 900 pages of printed
material, comprising the complete writings of William Blake together
with David V. Erdman's original textual notes (Harold Bloom's
commentary omitted). The original ASCII text file we encoded for the
electronic edition was generously supplied by Professor Nelson Hilton
(University of Georgia), whose own electronic concordance to Erdman is
a vital online resource for Blakeans.
The Blake Archive's electronic Erdman is tagged in SGML using the Text
Encoding Initiative DTD and is presented online using Inso's DynaWeb
software. But we should note that Erdman's edition is an
extraordinarily rich and complex textual artifact in its own right,
and encoding and rendering it has proven a substantial technical
challenge. For that reason we consider this a beta release, and would
welcome feedback and bug reports from users
(blake@jefferson.village.virginia.edu).
We will be updating our electronic Erdman edition continually in
response to user feedback, correcting any mistakes and adjusting the
formatting. We also anticipate migrating the edition to a later
version of the DynaWeb server, which will support keyword-in-context
searching (analogous to that of a concordance) as well as allow for
greater functional integration between the Erdman edition and the
materials in the Archive proper. We plan to emend the electronic
edition to correct errata in the printed editions of Erdman that have
been discovered by the Santa Cruz Blake Study Group and other
correspondents. Finally we intend to publish a Blake Archive
Supplement to Erdman, which will allow us to add newly discovered
Blake texts to the printed text, thereby making the William Blake
Archive's electronic edition truly the _complete_ writings of Blake.
The addition of our electronic Erdman is the first in a series of
publications slated for this spring and summer. We will soon add two
copies of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ to the Archive, at which
point it will contain fully searchable and scalable electronic
editions of 41 copies of 18 of Blake's 19 illuminated books in the
context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful
diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all
images, and extensive bibliographies. Soon after, we plan to publish
collection lists for eight of the most significant collections of
Blake's works. Fully encoded in SGML, these collection lists will be
delivered online using Inso's DynaWeb software and will be fully
searchable. Perhaps most significant will be the publication of
_Jerusalem_, copy E. With this addition, the Archive will contain at
least one copy of each of Blake's works in illuminated printing and
multiple copies of most.
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, Editors
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Technical Editor
The William Blake Archive
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