The Virtual Reunification of Scattered Archives

John UnsworthDean & Professor

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

October 20th, 2006

British Library

Examples from The Institute for Advanced Technology in the

Humanities, University of Virginia:

• The Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archive

• The Dickinson Electronic Archives

• The Valley of the Shadow

• The Walt Whitman Archive

• The Salem Witch Trials

• The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive

• The William Blake Archive

• Whitman photo, between 1848-1854, unknown photographer (perhaps John Plumbe Jr.), from a lost daugerreotype.

• “Look! Look! It is the ghost of Robert Goodell!” illustration of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Giles Corey of Salem Farms," in . Houghton Mifflin Boston, 1902. Artist John W. Ehninger, 1880, p. 752.

• frontispeice from “Mutilations” by Martha Nell Smith, with Jarom Macdonald, designed by Laura Vetter, 2000.

• William Blake, Europe, copy E, object 11 (Bentley plate 12), 1794. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

• Piers Plowman, MS R 3.14 fol 1v. Trinity College, Cambridge

• Frontispeice, “Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War,” Ed Ayers et al. http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/

• Astarte Syriaca, Alternately titled: Venus Astarte. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1876-1877. Manchester City Art Galleries.

Two very different cases, one American,

one British

America a Prophecy, copy A, 1795 (The Pierpont Morgan Library): electronic edition object 6 (Bentley 6, Erdman 4, Keynes 4)

After the Dazzle of Day (1887? 1888?) The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

The William Blake Archivehttp://www.blakearchive.org/

America a Prophecy, copy A, object 14 (Bentley 14, Erdman 12, Keynes 12). (Pierpont Morgan Library)

Engravings

Burins are held in the palm of the hand (fig. 4) and pushed into the plate and away from the body (fig. 5). To make a curved line, the plate is turned on its leather pad while the burin ploughs straight. Unlike drawing, writing, painting, and etching, engraving is nonautographic and a skill requiring years of training. This is why most painters interested in making prints learned etching, a technique in which one uses a needle like a pen and thus drawing skills already acquired, rather than engraving.

Encyclopedie, 1767. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Etching

William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, 1826, object 6 (Bentley 421.5) "The Messengers Tell Job of His Misfortunes.” (Collection of Robert Essick.)

Color Prints

William Blake, The Large Color Printed Drawings of 1795 and c. 1805, object 5 (Butlin 294) "God Judging Adam (Tate Collection)"

Sketches

William Blake, Sketchbook Containing Drawings for the Engraved Illustrations to the Book of Job, object 17 (Butlin 557.27) "Study for Plate 11: Job's Evil Dreams” (The Fitzwilliam Museum)

Water Colors

William Blake, llustrations to Dante's “Divine Comedy”, object 3 (Butlin 812.2) "Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest,” Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

Illustrations to Milton's “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and Descriptions of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” Designs, object 9 (Butlin 543.5) "The Goblin” (Pierpont Morgan Library)

Manuscript pages

Illustrations to Milton's “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and Descriptions of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” Designs, object 18 (Bentley 69.9) "The Spirit of Plato” (Pierpont Morgan Library)

The Order in which the Songs of Innocence & of Experience ought to be paged & placed, object 1 (Bentley 1) "page 1” (Library of Congress)

Scattered Blake Archives1. The Ashmolean Museum2. Birmingham Museums & Art

Gallery3. The British Library4. The British Museum5. Collection of Robert N.

Essick6. Fogg Art Museum7. The J. Paul Getty Museum8. Glasgow University Library9. The Houghton Library10. The Henry E. Huntington

Library and Art Gallery11. The Library of Congress

12. Metropolitan Museum of Art13. Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston14. National Gallery of Art,

Washington15. National Gallery of Victoria,

Melbourne16. The New York Public Library17. The Pierpont Morgan Library18. The Royal Institution of

Cornwall19. Tate Collection20. Victoria and Albert Museum21. The Whitworth Art Gallery22. Yale Center for British Art

Why Digitize?

The Book of Thel, copy F, 1795, Object 2 and Object 7 (Library of Congress)

Why Transcribe?

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, object 24 (Bentley 24, Erdman 24, Keynes 24) (Library of Congress)

Why Reunify?

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, copies L (obj. 29, Yale Center for British Art), R (obj. 30, Fitzwilliam Museum), and V (obj. 28, Pierpont Morgan Library)

Unification and UniformityImages are scanned from three types of source media

• 4"x5" transparencies• 8"x10" transparencies• 35mm slides.

The transparencies, which include color bars and gray scales to ensure color fidelity, are verified for color accuracy against the original artifact by the photographer and often by an editor as well.

Detal from William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, object 10 (Bentley 10, Erdman 10, Keynes 10) (Library of Congress)

Initial scans produce 600 dpi TIFF images, from which are derived 300 dpi TIFFs for color correction.

Images less than 40 x 30 cm are scaled 1:1 against the source dimensions of the original artifact so that on a monitor with 100 dpi screen resolution (or if another screen resolution has been registered in the ImageSizer applet) they display at true size (plus or minus about 5%)

Uniform Image Handling

Error in ftp transmission of William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, object 10 (Bentley 10, Erdman 10, Keynes 10) (Library of Congress)

Enlargements of items less than 40 x 30 cm display at three times the size of their original. Images greater than 40 x 30 cm are scaled 1:2/3 and display smaller than the original but can be shown true size using the ImageSizer applet on the Object View Page; the enlargements of these larger images are displayed at twice the size of the original.

Uniform Image Handling

Detail from William Blake, America a Prophecy, copy A, object 10 (Bentley 10, Erdman 8, Keynes 8) (Pierpont Morgan Library)

The BAD• A set of XML tags designed for a specific purpose

is known as a Document Type Definition (DTD). • The Blake Archive makes use of several DTDs.• The primary and most expansive of these is

known as the Blake Archive Description (BAD). The BAD DTD is used to encode all works at both the object- and the collection-level; its emphasis is on the description of Blake's works as physical artifacts.

The BOD, The TEI• The Archive's second DTD, the Blake Object

Description (BOD) is used to encode the textual metadata that constitutes the Image Information record.

• The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) DTD is used for other materials in the archive, such as its bibliographies, collection lists and Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, where description of the physical artifact is not the DTD's central purpose.

Editorial Goals & PrinciplesThe Blake Archive is an extension of ongoing archival, cataloguing, and editorial enterprises into a new medium.

Until now there has been no base of knowledge and technology sufficient to conceive, much less execute, an adequate comprehensive edition of the work of this multimedia artist.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, object 28 (Bentley 28, Erdman 28, Keynes 28) "Frontispiece to Songs of Experience” (Library of Congress)

Mono-media Artist?The dominant tradition of Blake editing has been overwhelmingly literary, partly because of what one of Blake's first critics, the poet Swinburne, called "hard necessity"--the technological and economic obstructions that have prevented the reproduction of accurate images in printed editions.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, object 10 (Bentley 10, Erdman 10, Keynes 10) (Library of Congress)

Artist or Writer? “On the art-historical flank a productive scholarly tradition of cataloguing has been complementary to but largely disconnected from its editorial counterpart on the literary flank.

Consequently, many students and even professional scholars know either the textual or visual side of Blake's work but not both, despite their interconnections at the source.”

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/public/about/principles/index.html

Detail from William Blake, Milton a Poem, copy C, object 9 (Bentley 8, Erdman not numbered, Keynes 8) (New York Public Library)

Multimedia

Editions of

Multimedia

Objects

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy R, object 11 (Bentley 11, Erdman 11, Keynes 11) "The Blossom” (The Fitzwilliam Museum)

As of 11 October 2006The William Blake Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 55 copies 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. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important series of engravings, sketches, and watercolor drawings, including Illustrations to Thomas Gray's Poems, Water Color and Engraved Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, The Large Color Printed Drawings of 1795 and c. 1805, and the recently published Linnell set of Book of Job water colors and the Sketchbook Containing Drawings for the Engraved Illustrations to the Book of Job.

The Walt Whitman Archivehttp://www.whitmanarchive.org/

"Song of the Universal" Item 6, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Leaves of Grass, 1855Frank Pearsall, photographer, 1869 (Library of Congress)

Whitman Manuscripts• Manuscript Poems• Manuscript Prose• Proofs & Galleys• Monographs & Edited

Collections• Poems Set to Music• Fragments• Notes• Clippings• Correspondence• Drawings• Photographs• Memorabilia

Photo of Whitman in his bedroom, 1891, taken by Dr. William Reeder, Philadelphia (Library of Congress)

Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts“Much of the work of the Whitman Archive is currently focused on editing of his poetry manuscripts, crucial documents that have never before been systematically collected, transcribed, and presented. We have chosen to define ‘poetry manuscript’ broadly, since it is often hard to determine the boundary between prose and verse in Whitman's manuscripts—especially in the pre-war years, Whitman habitually migrated his writing from prose to verse. For the purposes of this project, we consider as a poetry manuscript any writing in Whitman's hand that either is written as verse, contains a key image or language that eventually made its way into a recognized Whitman poem, or discusses the making of a poem.”

Scattered Whitman Archives1. American Antiquarian

Society2. Amherst College Archives

and Special Collections3. Boston Public Library. Walt

Whitman Collection4. Boston University. From the

Alice and Rollo G. Silver Collection in the Special Collections

5. Brigham Young University. L. Tom Perry Special Collections

6. California, University of, Berkeley. The Bancroft Library, Livezey-Walt Whitman Collection

7. Dartmouth College8. Duke University, The Trent

Collection of Walt Whitman Manuscripts

9. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Walt Whitman Collection

10. Harvard University. Manuscripts Department, Houghton Library

11. Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections

Scattered Whitman Archives12. Johns Hopkins University13. Huntington Library, Art

Collections, and Botanical Gardens

14. Huntington Public Library15. Library of Congress. John

D. Batchelder Collection16. Library of Congress.

Charles N. Elliot Collection17. Library of Congress.

Charles E. Feinberg Collection

18. Library of Congress. Thomas Harned Collection

19. Library of Congress. George S. Hellman Collection

20. Library of Congress. Walt Whitman Collection

21. Manchester University. C. F. Sixsmith Collections of Miscellanea, Printed and Photographic Material, Traubel Correspondence, and Walt Whitman Collection

22. Manchester University. Papers Relating to J.W. Wallace and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship

23. Mills College. Albert M. Bender Collection

24. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York

Scattered Whitman Archives25. New York Public Library.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection

26. North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of

27. Ohio Wesleyan University. The Bayley-Whitman Collection

28. Pennsylvania, University of. Walt Whitman Collection

29. Princeton University30. Rutgers University31. South Carolina, University

of. Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

32. Temple University

33. Tulsa, University of34. Virginia, University of,

Papers of Walt Whitman (MSS 3829, 5604), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library

35. Walt Whitman House in Camden

36. Washington University. George N. Meissner Collection

37. Yale University. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Transcription

Encoding Manuscripts

Scholars and Archivists“From the beginning, the project was conceived as one in which the scholars, archivists, and librarians would work together collaboratively. Each community brings special skills to the development of the online integrated guide. . . . the archivists on the team noted that special funding is typically required to provide item-level descriptions or calendar-level information, and that such information is not usually needed by most users. [However,] a national icon like Whitman may require item-level descriptions, whereas other collections may not merit the staff time. In such instances, the collaboration between scholars and archivists can be very valuable.”

“Disrespecting Original Order”“The wide dispersion of Whitman's manuscripts throughout his lifetime and after his death makes it impossible to determine an original order. . . . In the case of Whitman's manuscripts, the research group concluded that scholars would be best served by creating a single, integrated guide to Whitman's poetry manuscripts [which] would display the images of the poetry manuscripts (work by the author) with enhanced descriptions (work by librarians or archivists and scholars), and a citation and link to the individual holding institution's finding aid (work by archivists).”

*

* Frank Boles, "Disrespecting original order", The American Archivist, Vol. 45 No.1, pp.26-32.

Deathbed OrderThe first attempt to generate the integrated union finding aid was exciting. . . but grouping the poetry drafts was impossible without some means of identifying like drafts. Whitman was amazingly prolific, and he did not consistently name his poetry drafts in ways that logically or meaningfully grouped the drafts. [Therefore, project members] developed a system of identification which embeds in the union finding aid relationships between manuscripts of Whitman poems and the conceptual “work” they contribute to. The title of the “work” is derived from the final manifestation of the poem, most often the version Whitman published in his final, or “deathbed,” edition of Leaves of Grass (1892).

Cooperative Encoding“Planning how to unite the finding aids for poetry manuscripts described in over 30 finding aids at 29 repositories (some repositories have more than one Whitman collection) has offered some interesting challenges.” (Kay Walter and Ken Price. “An Online Guide to Walt Whitman’s Dispersed Manuscripts.” Library Hi Tech. Volume 22 Number 3, 2004. 277-282.)

Large Scale Virtual Reunification through an Integrated Finding Aid

Man(uscripts) United

Why?

“Our aim is to produce a scholarly edition of Whitman on the web. We're doing this in part because his work defies the constraints of the book. Whitman's work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions. Moreover, the economics of print publication have led previous editors to privilege one edition or another of Whitman's writings—usually the first or last version of Leaves of Grass.”

The dominant tradition of Blake editing has been overwhelmingly literary, partly because of what one of Blake's first critics, the poet Swinburne, called "hard necessity"--the technological and economic obstructions that have prevented the reproduction of accurate images in printed editions.

Larger Context?

And that context, in the future, includes the archives of

“Archives” such as these:

unsworth@uiuc.edu