In 1993, the editors of the William Blake Archive conceived it to “provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility” [Eaves et al.]. Highly disparate but not completely, since the Archive was designed to enable users to perceive relations between Blakean objects. But given the vastness of Blake’s multimedia output, these relationships, although encoded in our data, might not be readily apparent to users. Therefore, a primary goal of the back and front-end redesign of the William Blake Archive has been to clarify and make easily navigable the numerous types of relationships that the editors have identified within Blake’s corpus.

The problem of representing relationships in a digital archive is of course nothing new; indeed, it’s a fundamental one when designing an archive. But there are varying forms of the problem, which Manuel Portela summarizes well [Portela 2014, ¶32]:

1. representation of relationships between original materials and their digital surrogates;
2. representation of relationships of digital objects to themselves and with each other; and
3. representation of relationships between digital objects and the users interacting with them.

Each of these must be taken up and resolved to create a proper digital archive. Depending on the primary function of the archive, one form of the problem may raise more challenges than another. The Sentences Commentary Text Archive, to take a unique example, represents “organic relationships”, a term its editor Jeffrey Witt inherits and takes to mean relationships encoded in metadata that “can be tracked and made discoverable by future users”  [Witt 2016, ¶16]. The primary function of this archive is to provide access to metadata about commentary on a literary work. Naturally, the designer must work to encode relationships falling under Portela’s categories 2 and 3. The Blake Archive, given its emphasis on quality reproductions, has, since its inception, thought long and hard about category 1, and now for its redesign, has shifted its attention to 2 and 3, particularly 2. As it will soon become clear, though, the problem of representing relationships amongst digital objects goes hand-in-hand with representing relationships between digital objects and the users interacting with them. However, the latter is not necessarily a computer-related issue; these kinds of relationships are not encoded but made implicit, and they drive a software architect’s modeling of relationships between objects as much as the nature of the objects themselves do.

Insofar as relationships are concerned, the Blake Archive presents a unique case, since it is one of the only digital archives that has been in existence for decades and that is now having to reconsider its original configuration of relationships, and thus the effects that any new representation will incur. And to make matters even more uniquely complicated, as a multimedia artist and poet, Blake imposes upon digital archivists a multitude of relationships between objects that is fraught with unusual editorial challenges. A user of the Blake Archive may discover, for example, that Blake’s bestialized image of Nebuchadnezzar crawling on all fours is found in both the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Figure 1) and Blake’s series of large color printed drawings (Figure 2).

Some of these relations are currently listed at the bottom of the information page for every work of Blake’s; users visiting the info page for the Marriage — to stay on the previous example — can find the three versions of the Nebuchadnezzar color print linkable at the bottom of the page along with other drawings that the editors have identified as related to various designs among the Marriage’s twenty-seven plates.

But exactly how are these works related to the Marriage? And how is a user new to Blake able to know which particular plate of the Marriage (24) is the one related to Nebuchadnezzar, since there is no information pertaining to that relationship on plate 24’s object view page (or OVP — the page that visualizes and provides editorial information for individual plates) for any of the Archive’s copies of the work? These are among the many questions concerning relatedness that the staff at the Archive hope to address as we redesign the site, twenty years after its first digital publication. We shall return to these questions below and discuss how we are working to clarify and make easily navigable the types of relationships — both visual and textual — across the Archive, but first we will list the other ways in which relatedness is currently identified. As we have grown to encompass more and more of Blake’s work in various media, the problem of relatedness has grown as well, forcing us to acknowledge that our current methods of addressing it are insufficient. In a recent article, Ashley Reed, the Archive’s former and longest-serving project manager, touched on some of the problems plaguing our handling of relatedness as the Archive grew — and continues to grow — beyond illuminated books:

[W]hen Archive staff began building a tool that would actually link related works within the Archive (rather than just listing them for users to seek out on their own), we began to question this bibliographic definition of “relatedness” and its epistemological implications for our project. Were Blake’s watercolor illustrations to Milton’s Comus, commissioned by Joseph Thomas in 1801, “related” to the designs for Paradise Regained, completed no earlier than 1816, by virtue of anything other than Milton’s authorship? And if “texts by the same author” was a valid definition of “relatedness” for the Archive’s purposes, then was every one of Blake’s illustrations of the Bible “related” to every other one — with God understood as “author”?  [Reed 2014, ¶13]

During Ashley’s tenure as project manager, efforts to address such questions hewed close to the Archive’s “original vision of Blake-as-craftsman” — thus, relatedness should be confined to the material plane. But, as we discuss below, in what we envision as a continued exploration of challenges concerning relatedness that Reed raised in her article, despite our best attempts to disambiguate relatedness as the number and type of Blakean objects published in Archive increased, the need to further reconsider the epistemological implications of relatedness became clear, especially as we are venturing into restructuring our data on a relational model. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen writes that “for computer applications in the humanities classification most often involves either the application of pre-existing classification schemes to, or the ‘post hoc’ identification of clusters among a sample of, for example, texts” [Sperberg-McQueen 2004, ¶4]. Our classification of relations is decidedly “post hoc”, and the difficulty increases given that our sample involves both texts and images. We suspect that our struggles will be recognizable to other digital projects confronting the same issues, and we hope that our redesigned site might offer one solution to handling the tricky issue of relatedness in digital archives.

The Archive was originally designed to accommodate digital editions of various copies of Blake’s illuminated books, to which the first six years of publications attest.[1] Since a work like the Marriage does not exist as an abstract, Platonic ideal, but is only physically manifested in the twelve extant copies that Blake printed between 1790 and his death in 1827 (three of which consist of only three or four of the twenty-seven total plates),[2] the relationship between the various prints — each drawn from the same relief-etched copper plate but varying in coloring and in some instances in text and design as well — was the first and most obvious type of relationship confronted by the Archive’s early designers. As such, it is the type of relationship most deftly handled on the site. On every OVP for illuminated book plates/objects — the individual Blakean object being the fundamental unit around which the Archive is constructed[3] — users have the option of using the “compare” feature: beneath the image of the object is a box listing other copies containing the same object, despite that object potentially being ordered in a different place in different copies; users can select which copies they wish to compare, the pertinent objects for which are then arrayed horizontally — and made linkable — in a pop-up window (Figure 4).

Users can easily compare and contrast objects in different copies that Blake printed from the same copper plate, or matrix. This saves one the trouble of having to shuttle between the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Morgan Library in New York in order to determine the similarities and differences between plates of copies B and C of the Marriage, for instance. And as the Archive grew to accommodate non-illuminated book works, the compare feature still proved useful for any work that featured multiple copies, such as the two copies of Blake’s illustrations to John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

But this relationship via shared matrix is only one of the many types of relationships to be found in Blake’s work. The Archive soon began to publish works that were part of what the editors called the “same production sequence”, meaning that the works are related by virtue of being prepared for a specific production. For instance a draft of the Song of Innocence, “Holy Thursday”, appears in Blake’s early manuscript, An Island in the Moon (obj. 14); another well-known example is the “Death’s Door” design, which appears as both a water color and engraved illustration for Robert Blair’s The Grave, as well as the separately printed white-line etching that scandalized Blake’s patron, Robert Cromek.

Another example of works from the same production sequence that the Archive recently published are Blake’s preliminary pencil sketches, wash drawings, and water colors for the Grave illustrations. All of these relationships, however, cannot be seen using the Archive’s compare feature; instead, users need to select “Related Works in the Archive” from the dropdown “Show Me” menu in the lower left corner of the OVP.

Titles and links to the related works then appear in a pop-up window, though the images themselves are not arrayed horizontally, as they are with the compare feature. No doubt there is value for users in being able to see such related objects, but it takes a particularly knowledgeable or determined user to navigate the evasive trail between them.[4]

Other forms of relatedness began to manifest themselves as well, such as repeated text and designs in works that are neither printed from the same matrix nor part of the same production sequence, like the top half of the “Deaths Door” design that can be found on plate 8 of America a Prophecy.

Such relations were not indicated on the dropdown menu of the OVP for each object, but were rather added to the “All Known Related Drawings” lists on the work information pages; but, as noted above, works in these lists are not all drawings, nor is there explanation or classification of the various types of relations being compiled.[5] The information here was painstakingly gathered and is no doubt of value to Blake scholars, but as these lists grew and became catch-alls for various types of relationships, the need for revision became more pressing. And other questions arose: at what point does the “same” design become a “similar” design, and hence not worthy of the Archive’s deeming it relational? Is the bound figure in Blake’s illustration “The Execution of Breaking on the Rack” for Stedman’s Narrative (Figure 8) worthy of being conceived as the “same” design as the bound figure in America plate 3 (Figure 9)?

The latter is listed on the work information of Blake’s illustrations for Stedman’s Narrative, but upon reconsideration, the editors concluded that although intriguing parallels can be made between the two similar images, they are not a relational instance of the same design, and thus the redesigned site need not include these objects as related. Additionally, should Visions of the Daughters of Albion, because it was composed shortly after the Narrative and is indebted to Stedman’s attitudes toward slavery and colonialism, be listed as a related work? And if so, why isn’t the reverse relationship indicated — why aren’t the illustrations to Stedman’s Narrative listed as being related to Visions? Such instances seemed to suggest that the editors were venturing beyond the parameters of material relations as originally envisioned. Listing all thematic relationships was a step toward the unhelpful terminus of declaring all objects in the Archive related because they were all created by Blake.

As for the problem of similar — but not identical — images and texts, the Archive’s search functionality is designed to handle such cases, and it is being redesigned to handle them more efficiently. A large portion of the labor invested into the Archive over the years involves the textual transcription and image markup, according to carefully designed protocols, of every Blakean object, in order to render them searchable by text. Users can employ the vast taxonomy of built-in search terms to query the Archive for all instances of angels, for example, or for all designs featuring a male figure lying bound with arms and legs spread; among the results for the latter example will be America plate 8 and object 14 of the Stedman illustrations mentioned above — similar designs, but not the same design. On the new site, a robust search platform, Solr, will allow users to discover relations on their own, rather than relying on the Archive to present every conceivable relational instance. We recognize that the Archive, despite its aspirations to objectivity, is still, unavoidably, a mediating interface between Blake and the user, but we try to minimize the effect of that mediation; we present hard-coded relationships within the Blakean universe that we deem to be material, but we do not limit a user’s power to see other relationships, namely interpretable relationships. Even if we were to implement algorithms for generating relationships, a user, with the powerful search engine we are designing, will still have the freedom to ignore those relationships and discover others for himself or herself. And an improved Virtual Lightbox, the basic image editor provided with the site, will, like this search engine, allow users to explore and analyze potential relationships between Blakean objects in a digital space separate from — and thus not dictated by — the Archive.[6]As Reed articulates it, while the editorially determined categories of relatedness are, as such, inherently biased, the search and Lightbox functions allow for “user-generated connections” that are “not bound by the Archive’s own standards for relatedness, but are left to the user’s discretion”  [Reed 2014, ¶16].

Given the problems detailed above, the redesigned site is being developed to present Blakean relationships in a more systematic manner. After lengthy email discussions on blake-proj, our staff listserv, we have come up with relational categories that will be explicitly differentiated on the redesigned site. In terms of images, we have opted to designate three levels of relatedness:

1. objects printed from the same matrix (equivalent to the “compare” function on the current site);
2. objects from the same production sequence (equivalent to “Related works in the Archive”); and
3. objects with the same design, title, or subject.

The last category could certainly be subdivided, but we are using it to cover all remaining instances of relatedness that fall outside the first two categories and that could not be discovered via the search function.[7] On the new OVPs, pertinent relationships will be indicated by tabs directly beneath the images (Figure 11), objects to which the user can scroll on the same webpage (Figure 12). All of these categories address object-object relationships that have a material or textual basis. To the extent that it’s possible, we have tried to limit the relationships we identify to exclude interpretive ambiguity.

Textual relations require their own categories, and we are currently discussing how best to classify them. The search function is certainly helpful if the user already knows what text she is searching for, but we feel that indicating pertinent textual relations on the OVP — also indicated in tabs below the image — would also be beneficial. But a preliminary list of various types of Blakean textual relations, generated by the Archive staff at the University of Rochester who handle Blake’s manuscripts and typographic works, reveals how quickly such taxonomic efforts can become complicated.[8] The list includes categories that involve early drafts of finished works (like the version of “Holy Thursday” that first appears in Island and the Moon and later becomes a song of Innocence), repeating lines in disparate works, descriptions of and references to visual works in the Descriptive Catalogue and letters, texts that fall into the same special group (like those listed in the Descriptive Catalogue), texts that comment on, react to, or annotate other texts (such as the “Motto to the Songs of Innocence & of Experience” in the Notebook), and more.

But two larger textual categories can accommodate all of these instances: text-text relationships, and text-image relationships. Although only the relevant relational tabs will appear beneath the object image on the OVP, we could nest the particular species of textual relationships within either of these two genus tabs in order to avoid cluttering the OVP.[9] But of course a major objective for the redesign is to no longer hide the types of relationships that we have made accessible in the database. Here we are navigating the fine line between being transparent with the types of relationships we are encoding and presenting, and not overwhelming the user with too much information on the OVP. As Morris Eaves wrote in one of the many emails addressing this topic, “What began as a pretty simple matter of reference and utility (it’s handy to know that there are preliminary drawings of the engravings that Blake produced in illustrating Wollstonecraft; that there are multiple related versions of the Job designs and some of the illustrations to Milton; etc.) can pretty easily become an almost metaphysical matter. I think we all want, and should want, to resist that” [Eaves 2015]. It is difficult to keep matters simple when editing Blake, and as it turns out, trying to do so has forced us to at least consider the metaphysical nature of relationality, since we are now shifting to a relational database, which will serve as the ontological foundation for the Archive.

The difficult task of presenting more kinds of relationships in the Archive has compelled us to reevaluate Blake’s methods and reencode the connections between his works accordingly. As we have shown, we have had to set new specifications and engineer a new implementation for this part of the Archive, all while doing the same for the back and front ends of the rest of the site. And at the moment of this writing, the redesign is still in progress. We anticipate the need to address unforeseen questions and challenges as we further define and implement textual relationships, and as we continue to refine the interface to most clearly display the various types of relations we have identified. A clearer and more systematic handling of the complex relations among Blake’s art is just one of the many improvements that a redesigned Blake Archive will offer.

But the process of achieving these improvements does not have to benefit only the Blake Archive and Blake scholars. We hope that editors of other established digital archives, especially those archives in need of upgrades and with potential for exhibiting further relationships between their items, would learn from our practices. Particularly relevant here is our commitment to move from an XML query engine to a combination of the relational database, PostgreSQL, and the robust search engine, Solr. When we debated this transition and sought advice from other digital humanists, the responses we received were far from unanimous, yet all expressed strong conviction in their particular opinion. In the end, we opted to keep our data (BADs and info pages) in XML, not to abandon XML altogether, which many whom we solicited advised. Leaving our BADs intact is reassuring to the editors who have invested decades in creating them and who are familiar with their structure. But the addition of the table of relationships between every object in the Archive offers a more efficient and intuitive way to harness this aspect of our data. And typing the table into existence, we imagine this notion of archival relationship exploding into one “amongst” archives not just “within” them, and we invite collaboration in this regard.

We also intend to do a further study on the philosophical context of Blake’s practice of making related works of art, and on the philosophical context of our practice of archiving these related works.

Blake emphasized through his aesthetic the independent nature of the “Singular & Particular”, which he claimed to be the foundation of the sublime (E 647). Yet, as we have shown, Blake wanted his audience to see parallels between the objects of his works. In this way, he was more in line with Locke and Locke’s followers than one might expect, given his well-known critical stance against them. Being able to relate discrete ideas, or perceptions, was for these contemporaries of Blake foundational to higher levels of abstraction. While classical metaphysics divided the world into substance, mode, and relations, prioritizing the first,[14] Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding made relations most fundamental to his epistemology. Knowledge itself he defined as “the perception of the connexion and agreement” between ideas; when two discrete ideas agree, they bear a likeness to each other; they involve a relation [Locke 1975, 4.1.2, 525]. Exactly what allowed the mind to connect related ideas remains a mystery in Locke’s theory, but nevertheless, the ability of the mind to do so played a crucial role in the associative psychologies of Hume, Hartley, and Priestley later in the eighteenth century, all of whom acknowledged their debt to Locke.

The concept of relatedness in the context of archival practice may be historically situated in terms of 16th-century types of similitude, particularly “analogy”, the third of four that Foucault discusses in “The Prose of the World”. Like the first, “convenientia”, “analogy” is conceived in terms of connections or bonds, and like the second, “aemulatio,” it disregards distance in space. But it threatens to proliferate out of control, unlike the others, because it is not limited to the substantial; it admits subtle and abstract resemblances, the invisible [Foucault 2002, 24]. Analogy was reflected by negation in the idea of the cabinet of curiosities, a kind of collection, originating in the Renaissance, that contained objects whose analogical relations were not rigidly defined. Each object related to every other by virtue of being grouped together and falling under categories that bled into each other. Such a world precludes a spectrum of meaningfulness amongst relations. To prevent an archive from being a cabinet of curiosities, the archivist must delimit analogical relations between its objects. As Foucault says, “man is the fulcrum upon which all these relations turn” [Foucault 2002, 25]. The digital archivist, in particular, must also set the boundaries of the relations into a kind of spatial map conducive to computation. He must “encode” the relations because he caters not just to people but also to machine. The relations he brings into being have to be accessible to the mind as well as the code. This new type of similitude, analogy that is not “freed from the law of place”, we may call grounded analogy [Foucault 2002, 21]. It is one thing that separates nature from machine, and we’ve kept it constantly in sight while redesigning the front and back ends of the William Blake Archive.