Notes
1. Where available, I have provided links for visual referents throughout the document.
2. Joseph Thomas used Blake’s Shakespeare illustrations in his copy of Shakespeare’s second folio (Altick 41).
3. The problem of editing painting has been discussed by G. Thomas Tanselle, who describes the problem of editing the painting in its own medium (as in a restoration or cleaning), rather than a facsimile edition. See “Textual Criticism of Visual and Aural Works,” Studies in Bibliography 57 (2004): 1-37.
4. See Dennis M. Read’s “The Context of Blake’s ‘Public Address’: Cromek and The Chalcographic Society” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 68-86.
5. See Alexander S. Gourlay’s “What was Blake’s Chaucer?” Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 272-83.
6. Social-text editing emerged from critiques of editorial and bibliographical theory in the 1980s. See McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). McGann’s idea of social-text editing has evolved since his Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago P, 1983) and often in tangent with his discussion of the implications of digital media on textual and editorial theory and practice. The key works that explore social-text editing specifically include: Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1988); The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991); Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Dino Buzzetti and McGann’s “Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon” in Electronic Textual Editing, eds. Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: MLA, 2006), 53-73; and “From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text,” Romanticism on the Net 41-42 (May 2006). 11 May 2009 <http://www.erudit.org/revue/RON/2006/v/n41-42/013153ar.html>. Other important works that explore the idea of social text editing include: Leah S. Marcus’s Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Routledge, 1996); Peter L. Shillingsburg’s Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan P, 1996); and Jacob Bryant’s The Fluid Text: Theories of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002).
7. Lee and McGhee describe the necessarily “incomplete” nature of the Archive’s coding: “The focus of our encoding necessarily overlooks other features of the text, such as the hypothetical relationships between the fictional characters and real people in Blake’s social circle, the various narrative modes at work (such as poetry, song, and satire), or explicit references to the popular culture of Blake’s day, such as balloon hats and George Cumberland’s new methods of printing” (“Visions”). Nonetheless, this explanation does not account for the neglect of Blake’s co-texts.
8. Jason Allen Snart notes the verbal and visual element of the annotations in his The Torn Book: Reading Blake’s Marginalia (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2006), 28-32.
9. The principles of transcription articulated by the editors of the Archive remain rooted in the logic of the illuminated book: “Transcriptions of texts are, in the terms of textual criticism, as ‘diplomatic’ as the medium allows. That is, in line with the archival dimension of our project, our texts are conservative transpositions of the original into conventional type fonts, retaining not only Blake's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, but also (for the first time in a complete edition) an approximation of his page layout” (“Editorial Principles”).
10. Bentley provides a useful chart of all the appearances of the titles and their order (Blake Records 217-18).
11. Available at the Internet Archive, this facsimile edition (New York: D. Appleton, 1903) shows the same eighteen lines as the original 1808 edition, but in the original the poetry does not overflow onto the next line. Consult Essick and Paley’s facsimile edition (London: Scolar P, 1982).
12. These copies are also available at the Library of Congress online Rare Book Room.
13. See his “Introducing the Blake Model,” Blake / An Illustrated Quarterly 38.3 (2004-05): 92-102. <http://www.rochester.edu/college/eng/blake/BlakeModel/text.html> and “Blake & Virtuality: An Exchange” in Digital Designs on Blake>.
14. Ayers and Thomas utilized GIS “to understand the way social structures were arranged spatially” (“Differences”). Benjamin Ray’s Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft , also provides a good model for editing Blake within a wider social context, while Claire Warwick’s provides a good introduction to the utility of GIS and its relationship to print scholarship in “Print Scholarship and Digital Resources,” A Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 366-82.
15. Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie argue for the importance of Temporal Modeling in foregrounding aesthetic and subjective interpretation in the electronic environment. See their “Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 431-47.
16. Also consult Kevin Kiernan’s “Digital Facsimiles,” Electronic Textual Editing, eds. Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: MLA, 2006), 262-68.