13.0556 new on WWW: Pebbles; Blake; DLF report

From: Humanist Discussion Group (willard@lists.village.virginia.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 25 2000 - 07:20:09 CUT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 556.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

       [1] From: Ross Scaife <scaife@pop.uky.edu> (29)
             Subject: The Rattle of Pebbles

       [2] From: The William Blake Archive (74)
                     <blake@jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
             Subject: Blake Archive's April Update

       [3] From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> (75)
             Subject: DLF Report: "Systems of Knowledge Organization for
                     Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority
                     Files."

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 07:07:18 +0100
             From: Ross Scaife <scaife@pop.uky.edu>
             Subject: The Rattle of Pebbles

    Humanists may want to read this on the NYRB site:

    Jason Epstein: The Rattle of Pebbles

    Today the book business stands at the edge of a vast transformation, one
    that promises much opportunity for innovation: much trial, much error, and
    much improvement. Long before another half-century passes, the industry as
    I have known it for the past fifty years will have been altered almost
    beyond recognition. In the 1920s a brilliant generation of young American
    publishers fell heir to the cultural transformation that became known as
    modernism and nurtured it with taste, energy, and passion. As Einstein's
    generation introduced once and for all the themes of modern physics and as
    Czanne, Picasso, and their contemporaries had done the same for painting,
    the writers of the early twentieth century had created once and for all the
    vocabulary and themes of modern literature. Much elaboration would follow,
    but the fundamental work had been done and could not be done again. My
    career in publishing has traced the long, downward, but by no means barren
    slope from that Parnassian moment. (etc. - it's a fairly lengthy piece
    with plenty of ruminations on new technologies esp starting about p. 8)

    http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20000427055F

    ________________________________

    Ross Scaife (scaife@pop.uky.edu)
    Classics Department (POT 1015)
    University of Kentucky
    Lexington, KY 40506-0027

    web: http://www.uky.edu/~scaife/
    vox: 606 257 3629 fax: 606 257 3743

    The Stoa Consortium
    http://www.stoa.org

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 07:08:18 +0100
             From: The William Blake Archive
    <blake@jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
             Subject: Blake Archive's April Update

    17 April 2000

    The William Blake Archive <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake/> is
    pleased to announce that it has received a two-year Preservation and
    Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The editors
    and staff are most grateful for the support it provides as we begin to
    expand the Archive over the next few years to include Blake's drawings,
    paintings, and engravings.

    We are also very pleased to announce the publication of new electronic
    editions of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ copies H and I, both in
    the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. Printed in 1790 and 1827
    respectively, they join copies of _Marriage_ in the Archive from other
    printings: copies C (1790), D (1795), and F (c. 1794). Copy G, from a c.
    1818 printing, and copy K (plates 21-24) and copies L and M (separate
    printings of "A Song of Liberty") from a 1790 printing are forthcoming.

    The electronic editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and new
    images scanned and color-corrected from first-generation 4 x 5 inch
    transparencies; texts and images are fully searchable and supported by
    the Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.

    With the publication of these two titles, the Archive now contains 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. They also join our searchable SGML-encoded electronic
    edition of David V. Erdman's _Complete Poetry and Prose of William
    Blake_. With the forthcoming publication of _Jerusalem_ copy E, the
    Archive will contain at least one copy of each of Blake's works in
    illuminated printing and multiple copies of most.

    _Marriage_ copy H, perhaps the most illuminated of Blake's illuminated
    books, appears initially to have relied on colored inks rather than
    watercolor washes for its coloring. It was produced with copy B in 1790,
    with plates printed in various shades of red, olive, and green inks on
    both sides of the leaves. The impressions forming copy B (Bodleian
    Library, Oxford University) are uncolored, and those forming copy H may
    also have been left in this state originally. But copy H was sold to the
    painter John Linnell, Blake's young patron, in 1821 for two pounds and
    two shillings (less than half of what he was asking for books of similar
    size and number of pages), and apparently at that time Blake extensively
    reworked the pages by coloring the illustrations, adding gold leaf
    (e.g., title page), streaking the background of the texts in yellows and
    blues, and, what is most unusual, going over the texts in various
    colored inks, letter by letter, line by line. The results are pages
    among the most colorful that Blake ever produced and texts among the
    most challenging editorially, with many key words and phrases visually
    highlighted (e.g., "Contraries" and "Human existence" of plate 3 set off
    by dark ink in lines rewritten in red ink). Such detailed refinishing
    also resulted in a book with stylistic features characteristic of
    productions both early (facing pages and plates printed without borders)
    and late (elaborate coloring and page numbers).

    One stylistic element characteristic of illuminated books produced c.
    1818 and later is the frameline, usually one thin line in red or black
    ink drawn a few centimeters around the image. Copy H has no framelines,
    probably because they would prove visually jarring for pages that face
    one another. But they are used to superb effect in _Marriage_ copy I,
    where they set off each page as a miniature painting. Copy I, printed
    and colored in 1827 for Thomas Wainewright, was one of the last
    illuminated books produced by Blake. It was printed in orangish-red ink
    on one side of J. Whatman paper dated 1825, numbered 1-27, and finished
    in gold, watercolors, and pen and ink to match Wainewright's copy of
    _Songs_ (copy X). It was produced in the same style Blake used in c.
    1818, 1821-22, and 1825-26. Works from these sessions include _The Book
    of Thel_ copy O and _Songs of Innocence and of Experience_ copies Z and
    AA, which are in the Archive, and _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ copy
    G, _Jerusalem_ copy E, _America, a Prophecy_ copy O, _Europe, a
    Prophecy_ copy K, and _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_ copy P, all
    of which will enter the Archive within the year. Printing plates in full
    (i.e., with their plate borders), a feature of this late production
    style, can make pages appear slightly larger and introduce compositional
    elements missing in copies printed earlier. For _Marriage_ copy I, as
    well as copy G, the inclusion of the plate borders introduced the outer
    lines forming rocks and cavern shapes on plates 10, 11, 15, and 20,
    images named in the text but pictured only in these last two copies.

    Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, Editors
    Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Technical Editor
    The William Blake Archive

    --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 07:09:53 +0100
             From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org>
             Subject: DLF Report: "Systems of Knowledge Organization for
    Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority Files."

    NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
    News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
    from across the Community
    April 20, 2000

                   Council on Library & Information Resources Releases
                           Digital Library Federation Report:
                "Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries:
                   Beyond Traditional Authority Files," by Gail Hodge
                            <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports>http://www.clir.org
    <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports>http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports
                    http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub91/pub91.pdf

    For immediate release
    Contact: Dan Greenstein
    April 18,
    2000
    202-939-4762

    Report Explores Use of Knowledge Organization Systems in Digital Libraries

    Washington, D.C.- A new report from the Digital Library Federation (DLF)
    examines the use of knowledge organization systems-schemes for organizing
    information and facilitating knowledge management-in a digital environment.
    Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional
    Authority Files, by Gail Hodge, is the DLF's fourth published report.

    Knowledge organization systems serve as bridges between a user's
    information needs and the material in a collection. Examples of such
    systems include term lists, such as dictionaries; classification schemes,
    such as Library of Congress Subject Headings; and relationship lists, such
    as thesauri. These and other types of knowledge organization systems, which
    vary in complexity, structure, and function, can improve the organization
    of digital libraries and facilitate access to their content.

    The report provides examples of how knowledge organization systems can be
    used to enhance digital libraries in a variety of disciplines. For example,
    they can be used to link a digital resource to related material. They can
    be used directly or indirectly to provide more descriptive records for
    entities in the digital resource. Finally, they can provide access not only
    to a descriptive record, but also to location information about a relevant
    physical object.

    The author also discusses how knowledge organization systems can be used to
    provide disparate communities with access to digital library resources.
    They can provide alternate subject or multilingual access, support
    free-text searching, or add a new mode of access-such as visual or
    geographic-to the digital library.

    The report concludes with a discussion of what to consider when using
    knowledge organization systems with digital libraries. It provides a
    framework for the design, planning, implementation, and maintenance of
    these systems in digital library environments.

    Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries is available
    electronically at
    <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports>http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports. Print
    copies may be ordered for $15, prepaid, from the Council on Library and
    Information Resources (CLIR). Checks should be made payable to CLIR and
    mailed to CLIR Publication Orders, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite
    500, Washington, D.C., 20036-2124. Credit card orders may be placed by
    calling CLIR at 202-939-4750, sending a fax to 202-939-4765, or sending
    e-mail to <mailto:info@clir.org>mailto:info@clir.org.

    The Digital Library Federation is a partnership of research libraries
    dedicated to creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed
    collection of digital materials accessible to scholars and to a wider
    public. It operates under the umbrella of CLIR, which works in partnership
    with libraries, archives, and other information providers to advocate
    collaborative approaches to preserving the nation's intellectual heritage
    and strengthening the many components of its information system.

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