Intertextuality: The Virtual Database

~the double-edged sword of a virtual database~

Both the brilliance and the downfall of a virtual database is based upon its vast expanse of accessible information. From original copies to present day reviews and criticisms, the William Blake Archive contains enough information to keep someone busy for a lifetime. As an archivist intern working for the English department at Florida State University, I can see many advantages to having a virtual database. Years worth of research is at the tips of my fingers, and yet I can't help but regard the same database as missing a key element in all research: originality. With so much information present on the William Blake archive, I hardly know where to begin. The site is organized and thought-provoking (by this I mean to say that the site pushes for a certain way of thinking).

For example, by providing certain specific links, the creator of the website steers the audience to look at Blake's work in a certain way, structuring the writings by Illuminated Books, Commercial Book Illustrations, etc. This layout structures a certain reading of Blake that disrupts the natural tendency that is original to each researcher. Personally, when I research I start by looking at the most popular works by an author, then look at less popular works, and then I make up my own assumption about the pieces before consulting others commentary/criticisms. Upon accessing the site, my first action was to open each link and to see how far the archive extended. The accessibility to so much information took away the intimacy with the individual works.

While a virtual database allows for immediate access to a plethora of works and information, it denies the researcher the intimacy that comes with seeing and touching the original work first hand. For example, the other day Strozier library had an exhibition where they displayed a text we had discussed in class: The King James Bible. Even though I had seen pictures of the manuscript multiple times, the intimacy that came from viewing the real thing (even though it was behind a pane of glass) made the text come alive in a way that seeing it on a website could never produce. I believe that a text's aura really does draw it's essence from the originality of the text, and a scanned image displayed behind the barrier of the virtual database destroys that aura.