20 March 1997

In late 1996 we were expecting to add new illuminated books to the Archive very soon. At the time our strategy called for us to move forward along two tracks: adding new illuminated books to the site in its present, rather straightforward form, and meanwhile, in the background, developing the tools that will produce the final, more elaborate form of the site in the long run.

You can do a lot, after all, even with the books already available at the site. You can move through the plates in any order, bring up transcriptions of the texts as needed, bring up enlargements of the plates to examine details, and open multiple windows in your Web browser to compare plates with one another.

But in the final version of the site, you'll be able to do much more. As we've explained before, you'll be able not only to search all the texts for any "text string" (sequence of characters or words) but also, more remarkably, to search the designs--the larger ones, the small interlinear ones, or both--to locate any component that interests you. In addition, if your browser is able to run programs written in the language called Java (from Sun MicroSystems) will be able to use an innovative Java applet (little application, or program) called INote to study the images in the Archive by looking at enlarged details and referring to the elaborate network of annotations that we are composing for every design. We've recently been developing a second Java applet that will automatically resize all images to their actual size, no matter what kind of monitor they are being displayed on.

Early this year, however, it began to dawn on us that we should concentrate entirely on the ultimate, enriched version of the Archive. We have also decided that we should offer two versions of the site: one "Java-enabled" for those whose Web browsers can run Java applets, and one for users whose browsers can't. These changes in our strategy have unfortunately prevented us from adding new works, but it has freed up the time, resources, and expertise to get much further than we otherwise could have with the development work required to put the site in its final form. Here's what we can now report:

1. The end of the crucial first phase of adapting our search software, DynaText (from Electronic Book Technologies), to the special textual-visual demands of the Archive is now in sight. All the elements--the pages where the illuminated books are displayed, the pages where text and image searches are launched, the Java applet INote and the Java applet that resizes images automatically--are in place and roughly coordinated.

2. A lot of new design work has been required to make our pages look the way we want them to look in the new environment created by the search software. Most of the major redesigning is finished, and we're now deciding on details--at this point it's more like choosing kitchen-cabinet hardware than building walls.

3. To make the site more useful, we are adding two basic research tools, a standard text-only edition and a bibliography: David V. Erdman's edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (without the commentary by Harold Bloom) and a fairly extensive list of books and articles on Blake.

The Erdman edition comes to us courtesy of David and Virginia Erdman and Nelson Hilton (University of Georgia), whose idea it originally was to put the Erdman edition online. Nelson has also done some of the SGML "tagging," final responsibility for which rests with our project manager, Amy Sexton at IATH, who is now in the home stretch for this particular part of the Archive. Once it is at our site--by early summer, we now think--you will be able to search it along with, or separate from, all the other texts and images in the Archive.

The list of useful works on Blake should be available at about the same time, and similarly searchable. The standard reference sources--catalogues and editions--will be there, of course, and the entire list will be cross-categorized under various subject headings, such as the titles of works (e.g., Jerusalem) and special interests (e.g., Blake's visual art).

In summary, here's what we expect to happen soon:

April 1997: We hope to have working versions of the two sites--one for browsers that can run Java, one for browsers that can't--to test and demonstrate at the public Blake Archive site.

Summer 1997: By early to mid-summer, the text and notes of the Erdman edition and the list of useful works will both be online and searchable. In the course of the summer, we expect to add new illuminated books to the Archive. Several of those books are ready and waiting in the wings, because we have continued to work on the basic materials of the Archive: first persuading major private and public collections to let us display the works that we think will give the Blake Archive its scholarly coherence and integrity; then the long process of acquiring images of those works, scanning them, color-correcting them, editing the texts, annotating the images, and encoding everything, texts and images, in SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), the common currency of our enterprise.

Among the books nearly ready for primetime are All Religions are One (copy A), There is No Natural Religion (copy C), America (copy E), Europe (copy B), The Song of Los (copies A and B), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (copy D), The Book of Urizen (copy G), Songs of Innocence and of Experience (copy Z), The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los.

[Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (Editors)]

Blake Archive Homepage