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.
Contents
Introduction: Zoamorphosis and the Digital Humanities.
1. Archives and Ecologies
2. The Tyger
3. Jerusaelm
4. Digital Creativity: Teaching William Blake in the 21st Century
5. Blake and His Online Audiences
6. Folksonomies and Machine Editing: William Blake’s New Aesthetic on Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube
Coda: Dust and Self-Annihilation
“This book is really about, and does an extraordinary job of exploring, the popularity of Blake on the internet as well as the uses of social media to ‘customize’ his work. The authors write about it powerfully in the context of a DH which strikes them as remaking the teaching of literature, intoning at one point an argument that is crucial and timely: ‘[a]ny humanities education worth funding needs to engage with the public on some level.’ Yes absolutely.” -Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University, Studies in Romanticism 53 (Spring 2014): 133-46.
“For Whitson and Whittaker, the internet is all that writers like Godwin took the printing press to be: a continually refreshed opening on literary production in which interpretation is neither a matter of simple recovery of a writer’s meaning nor a processional reception history traced through a series of writers.” -Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago, Studies in English Literature.
“They offer the most informed and informative tour of Blake in the digital age that I have read…I found this study absorbing, informative, and emblematic of how thoughtful teachers and scholars are engaging twenty-first century students and colleagues in the ongoing conversation about the eternally-fresh William Blake.” -Mark Greenberg, Drexel University, Review 19