William Blake's work demonstrates two tendencies that are central to social media: collaboration and participation. Not only does Blake cite and adapt the work of earlier authors and visual artists, but contemporary authors, musicians, and filmmakers feel compelled to use Blake in their own creative acts. This book identifies and examines Blake's work as a social and participatory network, a phenomenon described as zoamorphosis, which encourages -- even demands -- that others take up Blake's creative mission. The authors rexamine the history of the digital humanities in relation to the study and dissemination of Blake's work: from alternatives to traditional forms of archiving embodied by Blake's citation on Twitter and Blakean remixes on YouTube, smartmobs using Blake's name as an inspiration to protest the 2004 Republican National Convention, and students crowdsourcing reading and instruction in digital classrooms to better understand and participate in Blake's world. The book also includes a consideration of Blakean motifs that have created artistic networks in music, literature, and film in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, showing how Blake is an ideal exemplar for understanding creativity in the digital age.

William Blake’s work demonstrates two tendencies that are central to social media: collaboration and participation. Not only does Blake cite and adapt the work of earlier authors and visual artists, but contemporary authors, musicians, and filmmakers feel compelled to use Blake in their own creative acts. This book identifies and examines Blake’s work as a social and participatory network, a phenomenon described as zoamorphosis, which encourages — even demands — that others take up Blake’s creative mission. The authors rexamine the history of the digital humanities in relation to the study and dissemination of Blake’s work: from alternatives to traditional forms of archiving embodied by Blake’s citation on Twitter and Blakean remixes on YouTube, smartmobs using Blake’s name as an inspiration to protest the 2004 Republican National Convention, and students crowdsourcing reading and instruction in digital classrooms to better understand and participate in Blake’s world. The book also includes a consideration of Blakean motifs that have created artistic networks in music, literature, and film in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, showing how Blake is an ideal exemplar for understanding creativity in the digital age.

This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing. Contains 37 original articles written by leaders in the field. Addresses the central concerns shared by those interested in the subject. Major sections focus on the experience of particular disciplines in applying computational methods to research problems; the basic principles of humanities computing; specific applications and methods; and production, dissemination and archiving. Accompanied by a website featuring supplementary materials, standard readings in the field and essays to be included in future editions of the Companion.

Blake said of his works, 'Tho' I call them Mine I know they are not Mine'. So who owns Blake? Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume takes Blake 2.0 as an interactive concept, examining digital dissemination of his works and reinvention by artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers across a variety of twentieth-century media.

Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.

In E-Crit, Marcel O'Gorman takes an ambitious and provocative look at how university scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula might be transformed to suit a digital culture. Arguing that universities were founded on the logic of print culture, O'Gorman sets out to reinvent the academic apparatus, constructing a hybrid methodology that draws on avant-garde art, deconstructive theory, cognitive science, and the work of painter and poet William Blake. O'Gorman explores the ways in which digital media might help to restore the critical, intellectual purpose of higher education, which has been repressed by the technocratic structures that dominate the modern university. He argues that the revolutionary, socio-critical impetus that spurred deconstructive theory and transformed the humanities was lost in the initial attempts to digitize the literary canon and demonstrate the convergence of critical theory and hypertext. Humanities disciplines, he argues, must reposition themselves through the invention of humanities-based interdisciplinary programs capable of adapting to the post-print vicissitudes of a digital culture. E-Crit is thus essential reading for anyone concerned with the practice - and future - of the humanities in higher education.

While overlooked by extant studies of the Gothic, William Blake’s literary and visual oeuvre embodies the same obsessions and fears that inform the Gothic revival with which he was contemporary.