Picture Problems: X-Editing Images 1992-2010
Morris Eaves · Digital humanities quarterly · 2009
After centuries of image deprivation, we now bathe in a sea of pictures, most of them digitized at some stage. In the 1990s, as humanists began to sense the advantages of networked computing on the web, they conceived major new editorial projects that would depend to an extraordinary degree upon the documentary power of pictures. Despite evident progress in devising sturdy and responsive standards, images, and tools, stubborn problems persist in several key areas that are explored here through an overview of issues that arise as the William Blake Archive acquires images, prepares them for reproduction, and makes them available for manipulation by its users. Editing electronic images in so unsettled and unsettling an environment generates the provisional success — weak success — that is utterly characteristic of X-editing, electronic scholarly editing in our time. Our dependence on current technology and the expertise of others is not a remediable condition. We must play the game as it presents itself, making the compromises that are necessary, and move ahead.