First created and conceived over 20 years ago, the William Blake Archive set a standard for the digital humanities. It’s now broken another mold with a complete redesign of its website.
The combination of text and illustration on a digital page never looked so polished and beautiful as it does on the newly refurbished website for the William Blake Archive. “For more than two centuries, the works of Romantic-era English poet and artist William Blake posed considerable challenges” the archive reports. “Reproducing his art in books has been expensive — and only captures a sliver of what he created. Literary critics claimed Blake’s writing, and art historians, his illustrations — with neither camp able to do justice to the full body of work.
“Two decades ago, the William Blake Archive set out to change that. Now the Blake Archive holds almost 7,000 images from 45 of the world’s research libraries and museums. It integrates editions, catalogs, databases, and scholarly tools into a single electronic archive.”
The project has been made possible through generous help from institutions around the globe, including the University of Rochester, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.
Explore yourself by visiting the website here; enjoy its stunning image quality and user-friendly interface.
This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.
