ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH

By Aurélia Chossegros

The William Blake Archive is one of the finest accomplishments of digital Humanities on the Web. Initiated in 1992 by three american scholars, Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, this project undertook to gather digital reproductions of the works of the english artist William Blake (1757-1827), both his poetry and his visual art, starting with his undervalued illuminated books, which were scattered and hardly available for consultation and even less for comparison. The ostensible purpose was to restore its integrity and its unity to the works of Blake, the poet, the painter and the printmaker, by organizing and interlinking images and texts, and by exploiting new information technology to deliver the historical, technical, and aesthetic contexts of his works, beyond the disciplinary boundaries. The Archive could only be developed with the active support and close collaboration - from the very beginning - of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The mission of the Institute, a research unit of the University of Virginia, is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. Thanks to a number of other technical and financial helps and sponsoring, and to the involvement of patrimonial institutions, the William Blake Archive was successfully launched on the World Wide Web in 1996. Since the onlining of its first illuminated books, two copies each of Blake’s Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the offer of this searchable open hypermedia archive, freely accessible on the World Wide Web has continuously increased, with more reproductions of William Blake’s words and pictures, but also with the creation of new tools, unprecedented and appropriable by the archive’s users, such as the ImageSizer, and the Inote. Beyond a mere introduction to the website, this article intends to offer a survey of the numerous realizations of the Archive, and to show its significance. Far from being only a monographical approach of the works of William Blake, the Archive represents a real search in collaborative editing and electronic images archiving and editing, with the conception of a new form of web-based sholarly editing named “x-editing” [1] by Morris Eaves. The editors have conceived the Archive as a model and an example for humanities scholars and future realizations in online editing. They intend to exploit the “radical advantages” [2] of the digital medium - especially for image editing - more involving and more demanding than traditional format, but also more promising, because always perfectible and adaptable to the wishes and the needs of scholars.

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[1] Eaves, Morris. "Crafting Editorial Settlements." Romanticism on the Net 41-42 (Février-Mai 2006)

[2] Editorial principles : Methodology and Standards in the Blake Archive.