Lecture Series: “Enlightened Graphics: Blake and New Technologies”

Friday, November 1, 2013

Speaker: Joseph Viscomi from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This talk introduces and demonstrates the William Blake Archive, a hypermedia resource for the study of Blake’s art and poetry integrating editions, catalogues, databases, and digital tools. To date, the Archive includes over 6400 images from 42 collections and has published 127 electronic editions of Blake's illuminated books, manuscripts, watercolors, paintings, color prints, and engravings. Conceived in 1993, it is one of the oldest digital humanities projects extant; it is considered the “gold standard” in digital editing and was the first electronic scholarly edition to receive the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition (2003) and to receive the Approved Edition seal from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions (2005). The Blake Archive is among the National Endowment of the Humanities’ Top Humanities Web Sites and was awarded the MERLOT Classic Award (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) for 2011.