Editing in Technicolor: The Blake Archive's Edition of the Vala or The Four Zoas Manuscript

The William Blake Archive started publishing digital editions of Blake's manuscripts in 2010, inaugurating new practices for encoding revisions and displaying color-coded transcriptions. However, Blake's notoriously complex manuscript, Vala or The Four Zoas, presents key challenges to some of the Blake Archive's guiding editorial principles and practices. This essay narrates some of the early editorial experiments for encoding and transcribing The Four Zoas—a process of experimentation, failure, and hope shaped by the Archive's own editorial history, the unique challenges of working with a complex manuscript, and the pressing problem of creating digital editions that can survive through time and across platforms.