The Blake Multimedia Project
The Blake Multimedia Project is an approach to studying and teaching the
works of William Blake using the tools of computer technology. Though he lived
two hundred years ago, Blake himself was a multimedia artist whose work combined
verbal and visual expression with technological innovation. Blake's work is
difficult to access because accurate color reproductions of the hundreds of
illuminated plates he printed are rare and expensive and because deciphering
their verbal and visual codes requires a large scholarly apparatus. The Blake
Multimedia Project addresses these difficulties with a hypertext interactive
edition that displays the plates on a monitor or projects them on a screen.
It allows the user to call up glossaries, critical intepretations, explications
and magnifications of details, comparisons to other plates, and teaching exercises
in print and audio modes. The hypertext edition can be used as a basis of
presentations, as a research archive, and as a basis for discussion and co-creation.
In English 510, an experimental graduate course presented in Spring 1995,
students used hypertext editions of The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book
of Thel, America and Job.
To download complete hypertext editions of Blake's
illuminated books, click here