Produced and maintained by Nelson Hilton at the Department of English, University of Georgia as part of the Blake Digital Text Project.
This Concordance owes its existence to the generosity of David V. Erdman and Virginia B. Erdman who, in a letter signed March 14th, 1995, convey David V. Erdman's permission to make freely available a digital version of his edition of Blake. This file, the "electronic Erdman" (eE) makes a fitting new form for a work which began over thirty years ago in the preparation of a text of the printed Concordance to the poetry and prose of William Blake (pub. 1967).
The text searched is the electronic edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition, ed. David V. Erdman (Doubleday, 1988); this file, however, reorganizes the printed text in loosely chronological order so that search results are returned in that sequence.
For assistance with OCR and initial proofreading of this digital edition, I am grateful to the University of Georgia Research Foundation and to University of Georgia Department of English, especially its research assistants William Cole, Margaret Crumpton, Patrick Darden, and Beth-Ann Neighbors. Alexander S. Gourlay gave extensive help and valuable advice on several occasions. Also offering assistance were Elisa E. Beshero, Gregg A. Hecimovich, Thomas A. Vogler, and Paul Yoder. Thanks also to Mark Trevor Smith, Joseph Viscomi and Alexander Gourlay, again, for still others. More remain, some newly introduced in the many file manipulations for this version, and notice of any would be appreciated. A few typographical errors in the printed text have been silently corrected, and soft hyphenations have been eliminated. For additional proofreading, I am grateful to the students of ENG 850, "Digital Blake" (Fall 1997): Jennifer Allen, David Brown, Jorge González, Jason Guder, and Judson Nichols.
The online concordance consists of several Perl scripts ("Behold this Gate of Pearl....!") which match the input string against the file and attempt to generate consistent format for the result. Thanks to UGA Perl wizard Greg Whitlock for showing how to speed up the context-retrieval script and to Zach Carter, "the earl of perl," for assistance with maintaining case in the KWIC array results. A known weakness of the line search (non-KWIC) version is that multiple instances of a search occurring on one line result in only one hit, so that the number of matches cannot necessarily be equated with the number of instances.
19 November 1997
18 April 1999