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This documentation is intended to help you get started navigating and searching the William Blake Archive's electronic edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
The William Blake Archive's electronic edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake is based upon the text of the 8th printing of the 1988 Newly Revised Doubleday Edition. It includes Erdman's textual notes but does not include Harold Bloom's commentary. The ASCII text file encoded for the electronic edition was generously supplied by Professor Nelson Hilton (University of Georgia), who in turn donated it with the kind permission of David and Virginia Erdman. The Blake Archive's electronic Erdman edition is tagged in SGML using the Text Encoding Initiative DTD (with some slight modifications). The edition is presented online using Inso's DynaWeb software (version 3.1). For additional information on our SGML tagging, please see the appendix.
The current release of the electronic Erdman edition should be considered a "beta" (or testing) version. This means that while we are confident that very large portions of the edition are now functional and well formatted, users may occasionally encounter areas that still require our attention. We would be very grateful for reports of any such trouble-spots: blake@jefferson.village.virginia.edu (please mention "Erdman" in the subject line of your message).
Basic Navigation
Help Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Users are provided with two primary means of navigating the electronic edition (besides searching, which is described separately below). First, as noted above, you may use the table of contents to enter the edition at multiple levels--either from one of the fifteen major sections represented at the top level of the table of contents, or at a lower level by clicking the blue triangle to the left of each entry in the table of contents. Clicking a blue triangle "expands" that section of the table of contents to reveal its constituent divisions. Note that these lower-level divisions are often themselves expandable; their subsections may be revealed by clicking on their respective triangles. This process is limited only by the level of nesting present in the internal SGML structure. Once a section has been expanded, clicking on the downward-turned triangle will "close" it (i.e., restore the table of contents display to its top level). Users may always access the text of the edition at any level of the table of contents by clicking the phrase underlined in blue; the selected section (<div>) will appear in the right-hand frame.
Note that as users navigate the electronic edition the table of contents in the left-hand window is dynamically updated to reflect their current position (which is highlighted in blue at the relevant table of contents entry).
Users may return to the top level of the table of contents (and the cover page in the right-hand frame) at any time by clicking the "Erdman" in large font at the top of the table of contents frame.
Also note that the table of contents window is resizable. Some users may wish to reduce the table of contents window to allow more space for Blake's texts. Others may wish to expand the window to allow a large subsection of the table of contents to be completely displayed.
Arrows
Once a section is selected, users may access the next (or the previous) section--at the corresponding <div> level--by clicking on the forward or back arrows that appear at the top and the bottom of the right-hand content frame.
Go To Page
The other means of navigating the edition is by the "Go To Page" dialogue box at the top of the right-hand content frame. Users may enter a page number from the printed edition of Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, and the electronic edition will be "turned" to the desired page. (The printed page numbers are displayed in the electronic edition in a dark blue font.) The electronic text will generally display at the lowest level section that has been recorded.
Searching the Electronic Erdman
Search: Search screen displaying the results of a search for "tyger."
Users may search for keywords and phrases by entering them in the search window in the bottom frame and clicking the "search" button. Searches may also be constructed using the Boolean operators AND and OR. (Search strings are not case sensitive.) If Boolean operators are employed the search will find matches for the specified terms within the same SGML section (<div>).
Search results are presented in the table of contents in the left-hand frame. Note that following a search, the table of contents will display only those entries containing one or more hits. The red numeral to the immediate left of a given table of contents entry indicates the number of hits the search has produced. At this point the table of contents may also be navigated as described above by clicking the blue triangles to reveal the distribution of hits within each entry's nested sections.
Clicking an entry in the table of contents will display the actual search result in the right-hand frame. The "hit" will be rendered in a large, red font.
Users interested in browsing search results may take advantage of the "Next (Section)" and "Previous (Section)" buttons located to the left of the search window. These buttons advance (or return) the user to the next or the previous section. Individual search results are displayed within the section in a large, red font. In order to move from one hit to another within the same section, users must either use their browser's "Find" feature to search for text within the frame, or scan the text visually for the large, red font.
The "Clear" button restores the edition to its basic browse mode by resetting the table of contents to its original presentation.
Textual Notes
Textual Notes: Clicking on a superscript "t" will open a new window with the selected note highlighted in red.Erdman's textual notes are indicated by a hyperlinked "t" character (in superscript). Clicking a "t" character will open a separate browser window displaying the textual notes available for that section of the edition. The selected note will be displayed in red for easy identification. Textual notes may also be accessed via their entry in the table of contents or via the "Go To Page" function.
Concordance
The rightmost icon in the bottom frame provides users with a link to Nelson Hilton's electronic concordance to the Erdman edition, which complements many of the features of the Blake Archive's edition of Erdman.
Updates
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). 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 Studies 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 our electronic edition truly the complete writings of Blake.
How the Edition Has Been Encoded
This section is SUPPLEMENTARY, but for those of you new to SGML and DynaWeb, some brief explanation of what "tagging" entails and how the edition was prepared will prove helpful, as these matters have direct bearing on how the edition may be navigated and searched.
A fundamental feature of TEI's implementation of SGML is that the document in question (in this case the complete text of the printed Erdman edition exclusive of Bloom's commentary) is represented according to its internal structural divisions (or <divs>, in TEI parlance). These divisions are nested as hierarchical structural levels. The complete Erdman edition--in its entirety--constitutes the most basic level of division <div0>. The fifteen major sections of the edition--which Erdman identifies by Roman numerals in his table of contents--are each a subdivision of <div0> (they are each a <div1>). These sections are then further subdivided according to their internal structure: in Section I, Illuminated Books, for example, each separate work (The Book of Thel, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, etc.) constitutes a discrete division <div2> while an individual text that is also part of a composite work like Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a further subdivision: "The Tyger" of the Songs is thus a <div3>, as is "Part I" of The Book of Thel. If an individual text were broken down still further into subsections, then those subsections would become a <div4> and so forth. Note, however, that stanzas and paragraphs are not typically represented as SGML divisions.
Understanding the concept of <divs> is important for users of the Blake Archive's Erdman edition because it explains the logic by which the DynaWeb software has organized the text for electronic presentation. The table of contents in the left-hand frame, for example, corresponds to the same hierarchical divisions reflected in our markup: in fact, the table of contents is generated directly from the edition's internal SGML structure.
Table of contents: Click on the image above or on the links in the text below to see the workings of the table of contents.Users should also note that DynaWeb is capable of presenting the same text at several different "levels" (divisions) depending on the one that is initially selected. Clicking Illuminated Books, for example, takes you to the <div1> title page for the Illuminated Books section (1); clicking the forward arrow allows you to move through this section at the "div1" level (2), with the effect of proceeding work by work: All Religions are One to There is No Natural Religion to The Book of Thel, and so forth (3). Note that at this level (division) a work like Thel is presented in its entirety (4). If, however, a user had requested a subsection of Thel by selecting a lower-level division from the table of contents, then only that section would display on screen--but with the option of proceeding to the next one (5). This may be useful for longer works such as Jerusalem.
All of this may take a little getting used to--but if you understand that the text is being represented in a consistent hierarchical manner and that you are capable of navigating that hierarchy at multiple levels, then you will be able to browse and search the edition effectively.
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