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