William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media by Roger Whitson, Jason Whittaker (review)

Book Review Essay Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker. William Blake and the Digital Human­ ities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media. New York: Rout­ ledge, 2013. Pp. 211. $93.56. In this study, Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker do an excellent job of describing Blake in popular culture (Whittaker’s forte) and in social media: Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube (Whitson’s). Chapter 1 focuses on “Virtual” Blake, offering its core theorization of the “virtual” and then tracking editions of Blake from Blake’s lifetime to digital media, especially The William Blake Archive. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on editions and adaptations of Blake’s “The Tyger,” while Chapter 3, on “Jerusalem,” de­ scribes the uptake in popular culture, particularly rock music and political organizations, ofBlake’s Hymn “Jerusalem” from Milton. Chapter 4, “Dig­ ital Creativity: Teaching William Blake in the Twenty-First Century,” de­ scribes the process of using Twitter to teach Blake and asking students to use software programs to create a final project that appropriates Blake’s work to create a meme of sorts. Chapter 5 purports to discuss “Blake and His Online Audiences,” but what it really does is demonstrate how digital media make it possible to trace and characterize Blake’s audience, even though the uses of Blake are not always digital (e.g., poems by Chamber music organizations, articles in newspapers). By contrast, Chapter 6, “Folksonomies and Machine Editing: William Blake’s New Aesthetic on Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube,” does describe digital uses of Blake’s work. This chapter explores how the semantic web will make use of rdf triples, metadata about each of its resources that could link disparate digital resources into one big giant billion-editor “edition” of Blake’s work, re­ sulting in a text constituted by the Internet as a whole. Excellent concerning the relationship of Blake to popular culture and digital media studies, this book calls for discussion because it purports more largely to bring a message from Digital Humanities (DH) to traditional disciplines of English literature and history: “[W]e suggest . . . that the humanities and literary studies should practice what Blake calls ‘selfannihilation .’ We should, in other words, abandon institutional egos and embrace experimentation” (25). Even given that Blake’s version of selfannihilation might not be as destructive as the term suggests, these are SiR, S3 (Spring 20x4) 133 134 LAURA MANDELL fighting words. The book as a whole attempts to delineate a way forward for literary studies, a way that they imagine DH to be leading us, and opposes academic “egos” to the spirit of collaboration. In this review es­ say, I will deal with DH’s relation to traditional literary studies first, look­ ing especially at the history of editing and the impact of “collaboration” on current editing practices, asking whether DH in fact preaches “selfannihilation ” to the humanities as currently constituted. I will conclude by discussing “disciplinary egos” and their relation to expertise. Part of the self-annihilation that Whitson and Whittaker imagine has to do with changing what humanists do: we should be, instead of merely in­ terpreting and critiquing, producing digital media. The kind of digital pro­ ductions they advocate are enabled by Web 2.0 and semantic web technol­ ogies, to which this book provides a good introduction. But there are distinctions to be made. Many of the new social media allow users to shape the content of any particular web site and/or text, whereas other editions may simply gather all available digital resources made by myriad hands dis­ tributed across the Internet. Older web sites tend to be more like the Blake Archive, presenting what is essentially a digital edition of a printed text, its digitization allowing users to perform some things with greater ease. It is much easier, for example, to search Blake’s illuminated books for images of bats using the Blake Archive than it is to fly all over the globe looking at all of his illuminated books housed in various collections to find those images. Ray Siemens calls this kind of edition, which combines computationallyassisted -indexing power with carefully edited and linked documents, a “dynamic edition.” Such an edition differs from the “social edition” that Whitson and Whittaker...