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- Title
"All Relate to Art": The William Blake Archive and Its Web of Relations.
- Authors
Fox, Michael; Fletcher, Joseph
- Abstract
The William Blake Archive emphasizes accuracy and objectivity. The photographed or scanned images are made faithful to their original objects in scale, color, and detail. The editors' notes are largely bibliographic and informative. The illustration descriptions consist of precise observations deliberately void of interpretation. The transcriptions are as diplomatic as the digital medium allows. And the explicit relationships between objects in the Archive are material; one can see, for example, copies of prints from the same relief-etched copper plate, or a design carried from a water color drawing to an engraved illustration. The scholar must be free to make his or her own interpretations. Since beginning to redesign the back end and front end of the site, the editors and staff have realized that more kinds of relationship might be made explicit. The challenge has been to decide which ones conform to our emphasis on accuracy and objectivity. In a neutral presentation of art and its contextual information, we can't tell the scholar that object X relates to object Y because they embody the same theme. That would impose on him or her our own interpretation. But we can say that X relates to Y because they contain some of the same text. In this paper we discuss the difficult task of digitally presenting more kinds of relationships in the Archive while staying objective. We explain how the task has compelled us to reevaluate Blake's methods and reencode the connections amongst his works accordingly. We describe planned enhancements to our tools used for representing and displaying these connections--enhancements that would benefit all archives, not just the Blake Archive. And finally we gesture towards further research into the philosophical context of Blake's practice of making related art and into the idea of relationship in archives in general.
- Subjects
BLAKE, William, 1757-1827; ARCHIVES in art; DIGITAL libraries; COMPUTER art; ACCURACY of information; OBJECTIVITY in art
- Publication
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2018, Vol 12, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1938-4122
- Publication type
Article