Notes

For their feedback and assistance with this project I am indebted to Sandy Baldwin, Joshua David Gonsalves, Stephen Harris, Adam Horne, Jeremy Jarrell, Wayne Ripley, Frances Van Scoy and Susan Warshauer.
For further reflections on the project described herein, see Adam Komisaruk, Steve Guynup and Fred Yee, “Blake and Virtuality: An Exchange,” Digital Designs on Blake, ed. Ron Broglio, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, forthcoming <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/>.

1. All my Blake quotations are from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly revised ed. (New York: Anchor, 1988), hereafter “E.”

2. Technically, Albion himself is both microcosm and macrocosm: the universe is mapped out on his body, but his body is also positioned within this universe, which in turn is mapped out on his body, etc. To create this mise-en-abyme effect, The Blake Model will be programmed with a simple loop, so that zooming in on Albion eventually returns the user to a bird’s-eye view of Albion. Stephen Guynup captures something of this idea in his virtual rendition of Blake’s “The Crystal Cabinet,” which envisions “Another England” within England; with Ron Broglio and Thomas Tulis, “William Blake’s ‘Crystal Cabinet,’” January 2003 <http://www.pd.org/~thatguy/crystal/index.html>.

3. See Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983) 205-30; William Blake, Milton a Poem and the Final Illuminated Works, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, vol. 5 of Blake’s Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 142.

4. Blake Digital Text Project, ed. Nelson Hilton <http://www.english.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html>; William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi <http://www.blakearchive.org>.

5. Mary Lynn Johnson, “The Iowa Blake Videodisc Project: A Cautionary History,” The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 132-33.

6. Helen Burgess, Jeanne Hamming and Robert Markley, “The Dialogics of New Media: Video, Visualization, and Narrative in Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars,” Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, ed. Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003) 61-88.

7. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi and Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Standards, Methods and Objectives in the William Blake Archive,” The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 142. The essay is a response to Andrew Cooper and Michael Simpson, “The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake’s Eternal Hacking,” The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 125-31. Cooper and Simpson respond to this response in “Looks Good in Practice, but Does It Work in Theory? Rebooting the Blake Archive,” The Wordsworth Circle 31.1 (2000): 63-68.

8. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 172.

9. Karl Kroeber, “The Blake Archive and the Future of Literary Studies,” The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 123, 125.

10. See, for example, initiatives of the Center for Writing Excellence, such as the Scott’s Run Writing Heritage Project, 2002 <http://www.as.wvu.edu/~srsh/>; the Distance Learning Program, 2002 <http://www.as.wvu.edu/english/cwe/distance.html>.

11. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000) 19.

12. “By rejecting [Ruthven] Todd’s theory of transferred texts,” Viscomi himself recognizes that he is remediating “the nineteenth-century theory [of Blake’s technique], in which a ‘preliminary drawing’ of a plate, or ‘illustrated song,’ is reproduced in ‘facsimile’ by being redrawn directly on the plate with the same tools used to execute the originals” (26).

13. See Robert N. Essick, William Blake: Printmaker (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 160-61; also Viscomi 68-69.

14. Morris Eaves, The Counter Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) 248.

15. See Ron Broglio, “Becoming-zoa,” Visible Language 33.2 (1999): 128-49; also, with Marcel O’Gorman and F. William Ruegg, “Digging Transformation in Blake: What the Mole Knows about the New Millennium,” The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 144-54.

16. This paradox reappears in Orc, who is at once the child of Los and Enitharmon and the fallen form of Luvah.

17. In this respect, the flicker may be thought of in terms of Martin Heidegger’s Augenblick, the twinkling of an eye, the “moment of vision” in which “nothing can occur; but … permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or present-at hand” (H338); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 388.