Jon Saklofske

Digital Doors of Perception: Illuminating Blake through New Knowledge Environments

The unique work and non-traditional production methods of William Blake have inspired me to design digital platforms that ask new critical questions regarding Blake’s output. Custom-fade allows for overlapping comparisons between the variants of William Blake’s printed images, and is exposing correlations in ways that traditional materials and methods cannot. Similarly, NewRadial, designed to sort, browse through, manipulate and comment on Blake’s iconic pages in a visual environment, was initially intended to open new possibilities for traditional critical approaches relating to Blake’s work. Its usefulness beyond specific Romantic period material has since prompted its evolution into a much more robust new knowledge environment. The growth of NewRadial (from a Blake-inspired tool to an environment that is helping to redefine the ways we might engage in scholarly collaboration) is an example of the way that larger methodological initiatives and metacritical ideas can emerge from addressing particular Rom...

Predispositions to Concept Mapping: Case Studies of Four Disciplines in Higher Education

This chapter investigates the response of four teaching academics in higher education to the use of electronic concept mapping. As such, it would be considered primarily a phenomenological study rooted in qualitative analysis. In particular, the chapter will analyze four independent projects where the instructor used electronic concept mapping for the first time. The academics first undertook these projects beginning in 2010. Three academics teach in North American universities while the last works in a Jamaican university. These projects include (1) use of electronic concept mapping to design anesthesiology curriculum in a medical school, (2) research on the use of virtual worlds in teaching undergraduate English literature, (3) the use of two-dimensional concept mapping in teaching undergraduate Greek mythology, and (4) using concept maps in a Jamaican graduate course in architecture education The analysis and synthesis of these findings will provide an introspective that sensitizes potential users to the nuances of the technology and how important it is to consider first the inherent pedagogical framework.

Remediating William Blake: Unbinding the Network Architectures of Blake's Songs

The poetic parallels, figurative overlaps, and thematic frictions between the pages of William Blakes dynamic Songs of Innocence and of Experience establish a local area network architecture that is both complementary and antagonistic to the traditional pathways generated by/through bookspace. While this tension between connective paradigms contributes to the revolutionary vitality of Blakes work, its full implications have been stultified by generations of reproduction that privileged the organizational paradigms related to the printed book and its circulatory systems. However, flexible and fluid digital distribution, primarily via the William Blake Archive and its participation in NINES, extends the material bounds of Blakes printed work into a wide area network. This not only transcends Blakes distributive frustrations, but the sharing and communication functions engendered by network architectures encourage a more explicit recognition, re‐imagining and extension of the networked features and applications of Blakes multimedia Songs. Unfortunately, as Blakes work has migrated to the digital arena, traditional doors of print‐based perception have often been reinforced by unimaginative and anachronistic interfaces. NewRadial, a data visualization application, more fully illuminates the network architecture at the heart of Blakes Romantic creativity, and demonstrates the ways in which our current technological networks can extend interpretative possibility.

Thoughtless Play: Using William Blake to Illuminate Authority and Agency Within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Authorial responsibility has been increasingly decentralized by the collective manipulation of media parameters. Whereas this encourages a sense of freedom for those exposed to such narratives, participation in narrative realization and a lack of interpretative dislocation can actually impair a reader. To demonstrate how excessive mediation can liberate or limit an audience, this article will compare how William Blakes “The Fly” and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas differently enable and disable the authority and agency of storytellers and readers.