The William Blake Archive: An Overview

This essay offers an introduction to and summary of The William Blake Archive (WBA) as an online, multimedia, scholarly edition. It covers the history of the WBA's initial online publication in 1996 and then describes the conception and structure of the edition, its editorial principles, and “object-centered” organization, hierarchical structure, and interface. Next the essay surveys the WBA's editorial methods and procedures, including how the resource – which aims for “virtually reunified” corpus – has been produced and managed at The University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), and concludes with a look at the method of publication and delivery (including the role of structural markup and the World Wide Web).