William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media

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. William Blake and the Digital Humanities draws upon foundations set out in the past decade by Whittaker in the study of Blake's reception and his writings on digital and online media, as well as work in digital pedagogies and social media by Whitson who is a digital humanist and Associate Professor of English at Washington State University. The focus of his own research is on the reception of nineteenth-century British literature and William Blake in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the philosophical and political impact of online collaboration and social media. This book examines Blake’s work as a social and participatory network, a phenomenon described as zoamorphosis, which encourages others to 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. Some of the aspects of the use of Blake in the digital humanities were presented as part of the DHSI 2013 Colloquium in a paper entitled: "What Can Digital Humanities do for 19th-Century Literature? The Case for William Blake"