Remediating William Blake: Unbinding the Network Architectures of Blake's Songs

Abstract

The poetic parallels, figurative overlaps, and thematic frictions between the pages of William Blake's dynamic Songs of Innocence and of Experience establish a local area network architecture that is both complementary and antagonistic to the traditional pathways generated by/through bookspace. While this tension between connective paradigms contributes to the revolutionary vitality of Blake's work, its full implications have been stultified by generations of reproduction that privileged the organizational paradigms related to the printed book and its circulatory systems. However, flexible and fluid digital distribution, primarily via the William Blake Archive and its participation in NINES, extends the material bounds of Blake's printed work into a wide area network. This not only transcends Blake's distributive frustrations, but the sharing and communication functions engendered by network architectures encourage a more explicit recognition, re‐imagining and extension of the networked features and applications of Blake's multimedia Songs. Unfortunately, as Blake's work has migrated to the digital arena, traditional doors of print‐based perception have often been reinforced by unimaginative and anachronistic interfaces. NewRadial, a data visualization application, more fully illuminates the network architecture at the heart of Blake's Romantic creativity, and demonstrates the ways in which our current technological networks can extend interpretative possibility.