13.0428 new on WWW: Erdman's edn in Blake Archive

From: Humanist Discussion Group (willard@lists.village.virginia.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 22 2000 - 07:05:36 CUT

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                   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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