Quit or Carry On?

Story #1

Recently I requested a DVD player for my undergrad course “Maximum English.” One of the four key topics of the course is Medium (. . . Mythos, Melos, and Metaphor). The class and I were trying to compare Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: a Biography with Sally Potter’s film adaptation and Sarah Ruhl’s live stage version, which was being mounted by a visiting director for our theater program. The multiplying media (and their multiple, intersecting, interlocking, nested conversions into Blu-Ray, film, the printed book, photocopied bits and pieces—all converted to one degree or another to projectable “slides,” as we’ve oddly come to call them, from my computer and the classroom’s projection equipment) seemed to offer a tantalizing way into the subject of medium/media.

On day 1, over half the class time was spent getting the Blu-Ray DVD to play. The classroom management people had bought sleek new minimalist disc players that promise easy setup and universal application. Attach the disk drive to the computer, push a key or two, and voilá! The DVD produces a bright, clean, high resolution image on the large projection screen that lowers itself in front of the chalkboard (chalkboard!?).

But of course not quite. In the end it took three DVD players—and the one that finally worked was a portly box rather than a compact disk drive. That player, which someone of my age might have expected to see lined up on a shelf of electronic equipment—turntable, receiver, CD player, cable box—sat awkwardly propped on the floor so that its cords and cables would reach the necessary connectors (including electricity from the plug on the wall).

Blu-Ray was the ultimate phase of DVD development, the last word you may say—which, as it turned out, it indeed was. (The story is a little more complicated, of course: look online for many details.) By the time Netflix shut the doors on the origins of its own success—delivering DVDs by mail until the final red envelope went out in September 2023—the company had moved to streaming technology that centers on movies, TV, and other media formats delivered online at the urgent whims of the user. The hard plastic Blu-Ray DVDs that made Netflix’s reputation for quality, speed, and efficiency in getting what you want within—days!—were no longer of commercial interest to Netflix. The DVDs themselves were of such little value that the company permitted anyone (me) who had one or more at home when the doors closed to keep their disk(s). Thus I had the Blu-Ray disk of Orlando in its not quite pristine but instantly recognizable, almost lovable, slightly soiled Netflix envelope.

Story #2

Yesterday the managing editor of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Sarah Jones, and I had a meeting with the two managers of the university’s new open access publishing initiative. In recent years the scholarly journal, now approaching 60 years old, has been integrating itself more and more tightly with the Blake Archive. But every year the quarterly loses subscribers. Once it was losing individual subscribers; now it loses institutional subscribers as well; and subscription agencies, which handle bundles of subscriptions for institutions such as libraries, have been vanishing to the point where only a handful, such as EBSCO, remain. All this is part of a larger pattern, of course: individual scholarly habits have changed, and institutions have changed; publishers have changed, and academic libraries of every size and type have changed. Massively changed—changes much noticed by their customers, the professors and graduate students who regularly grumble about libraries that shove books to the margins in favor of clever, colorful study spaces for students at the center—with, occasionally, some lecture rooms, conference rooms, and newfangled workplaces for an assortment of digital labs producing exotic forms of texts, maps, 3-D printing, multi- and hyperspectral imaging, etc.

It may sound self-serving of me to say so, but it’s really not that no one wants Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. It remains firmly at the center of the formidable Blake universe. The quarterly has an international bibliographer who records hundreds of new entries per year; a review editor; an editor who oversees the coverage of exhibitions worldwide; an editor who covers the worldwide sales of Blake’s work; and an editor who oversees the coverage of Blake and popular culture, including loads of music of all stripes, also worldwide. The quarterly itself publishes groundbreaking scholarly articles (almost always illustrated, reflecting Blake’s manifold skills as writer, printmaker, and painter) in every annual cycle.

It’s simply that fewer and fewer scholars want to pay for the quarterly by subscription, the reliable old business model. Over the last several years we have gradually adjusted to the prevailing circumstances by a tweak here and a tweak there in production, coverage, alliances, subscription systems (from modified open source to print on demand). We simply can’t continue to exist, as we did for decades, on subscription income. And there is no agency that hands out grants to scholarly journals. So we can see the road narrowing, the sources of money shrinking, the ages of the editors advancing (and, after all, journals most often exist on the strength of faculty reputations, and those reputations usually vanish when faculty retire from active scholarship, as they inevitably do). I have vivid memories (not necessarily 100% accurate) of David V. Erdman’s strenuous efforts to position the Bulletin of the New York Public Library (where he had worked for years) for longterm survival (on his terms, of course). The BNYPL has lived on since David’s death—but it has the distinct advantage of being an institutional journal: it survives largely because its institution, the formidable NYPL, survives.

Story #3

The William Blake Archive first saw the light of (something like) day on the servers at the Institute of Advanced Technology at the University of Virginia in 1994–96—following a period of collaborative thinking and planning that, fortunately, arrived just in time to cross the border between the CDs (remember the CD games and dictionaries at Borders, Blockbuster, RIP?) of yesteryear and the World Wide Web that soon prevailed as the digital medium of choice and remains so to this day, though no longer in Netscape form, and not in SGML>HTML where we started but in XML>HTML to which we migrated—and bye-bye, Java. Much has changed but much more remains the same or similar. Which can lead to the illusion that it will always be so—and that we are safe piling archive upon archive and stuffing them with words and images and burning issues of concern that can be served by the twist of an archival idea. Not that we can do everything we of Blake world might want to do: we want to publish marginalia that look exactly like the marginalia that Blake scrawled in the margins of his Reynolds’ Discourses and his Wordsworth, and we want to incorporate a history of composition in our editions of Blake’s Notebook and Vala, or, The Four Zoas. We’re using exotic multispectral imaging techniques to decipher mystifying details. We’re always pushing the limits of the media we depend upon.

All this and much more can produce the illusion that we are safe from the dissolutions of memory. But—of course—we and our kind are never safe. Since our thrilling, pioneering days at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities so many digital projects, or call them archives, have come and gone, left finally to breathe their last by the roadside of time, money, and memory. So much hope invested, so little usable finished product/profit to show for it. So many NEH grants, so much free scholarly labor from editors, so many arcane programming skills half-learned . . . all now discarded by the roadside of digital history 1990–2023. We once complained about the lack of on-campus facilities for digital humanists to conceive and carry out their clever projects. Those digital labs have multiplied and projects still fade and die . . . for lack of funding and steadfast, enduring devotion, doomed mostly by their own shifty digitality.

Inspired by the example of William Blake—whose memory as a painter/printmaker/poet was revived just in time for a later generation of devoted fans to save his work and reputation for processing by “the method[s] by which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 15)—I have been fascinated for decades by the mysteries of human memory, especially how painfully difficult it is to get our knowledge over the border between generations, where the things and ideas we’ve maintained so scrupulously during our lifetimes go to die, as relatives sort through our postmortem remains, as well meaning friends and relatives burn our poems and our revealing letters, and as the digital labs that worked so diligently to help us develop our archival projects turn over our spaces to the latest living thing that has applied for a grant to support the development of a shiny new project based on a cool idea. They need that server space; they are starved for cash; they need a new kind of programmer to service the needs of their exciting new project. Aging Archive X gets little traffic and has little obvious use that can’t be sacrificed.

So let’s count them. How many digital archives created by humanists in this generation will make it across the Styx or Sahara or Himalayas to the next . . . and the next and the next? Will artificial intelligence help save them from their obsolescence, automatically updating them as programming and networks change? Why would an academic institution provide the resources to support the survival of project X, in which so much blood, sweat, tears, money, and free labor have been invested—now that the projectors-in-chief are retired or dead?

I once heard a wise historian say, don’t expect loyalty from institutions.

Morris Eaves (1944–2024) was a professor of English and Richard L. Turner Professor of the Humanities at the University of Rochester. He was a founding co-editor of the online William Blake Archive (https://blakearchive.org/), which received the Modern Language Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Edition prize in 2003; he also served as co-editor of the journal Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (https://blakequarterly.org/index.php/blake). He was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and the author or editor of seven books, and wrote or contributed to countless articles, reviews, and interviews.