For this course my partner and I aimed to examine and research William Blake, an English poet, painter and printmaker, a person who wasn’t recognized for all his works during his life. Blake is a Romantic poet who was also famous for his illustrations. We chose to discuss Blake’s work because his views on religion and life are very interesting and present in his works from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as well as Milton, but most importantly his work was grown into the minds of all the following successors that revived and where inspired by contribution to the romantic movement.
The main goal of our project was to find the main theme in Blake’s work. Other questions we asked ourselves were: Did anyone from his family influence his work? Why was Blake’s work only relived after his death? Who did he inspire after his death?
We managed to achieve the goal of finding the main theme of his work, and we also discovered that his parents encouraged him to lead an artistic life. However, we did not focus on why his work was not recognized during his lifetime. Our project scope changed to focus more on the theme of his poems and novels, rather than expand on Blake himself as a person and why he was not famous when he lived.
Since neither me nor my partner really knew anything about Blake, we learned a lot about him. We learned that Blake was a visual artist, who engraved his poems in illustrations, we also learned that Blake was a religious man but opposed all forms of organized religion. We saw Blake’s religious views through his poems mainly Milton, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake discusses the relationship between man and God.
The digital tools we used helped us a lot with our findings. Voyant Tools was the most important to our project since through it we could explore the theme of Blake’s work by finding the most common words, their trends throughout the poems, and their context in different parts of the poems.
The mapping tools such as Topotext also helped us discover the many different places that Blake mentions in his writing, which shows us that Blake’s views on life were not centered only in London where he was born, but extended to all different parts of the world.
TimelineJS provided us a unique platform to display and present our project. It helped us navigate through Blake’s life and peoms in chronological order, while being able to display some pictures, videos, maps & GIFS. In addition, it also allowed us to embed most of the tools used during the course to present our author and his work. Despite everything my partner and I didn’t present our work in the right order which may have confused both our class mates as well as our Respected professor in terms of our research criterion.
Working with those tools, although a bit complicated at first, was fun and interesting. They helped us in constructing a well-designed DH project which we are proud of and which we will certainly use as a guideline for future works in digital tools.
Here you can find our project timeline:
Wissam's Blog 