Summary
  My research has been principally concerned with literature and the visual arts and with the cultural contexts of British Romanticism, especially the interlocking histories of technology and commerce. My current project, Posterity, represented so by a series of articles, is a speculative study of editorial theory and practice in terms of the audience's historical power to preserve, alter, and abandon its objects of interest across generations. From this angle I am exploring the social role of editing and its product, the edition, in connection with such issues as censorship, plagiarism, and intellectual property. I want to understand "editing" in its broad, fundamental connections with communication, information control, and cultural memory (through loss, renovation, and restoration) across a range of arts and media--which I have taken to calling "xediting" to distinguish it from more limited notions of editing.  My interests in multimedia editing, media history, and British Romanticism are combined in his work as a project director and editor of The William Blake Archive, the online digital edition of Blake's literary and artistic work, sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of Rochester, and the Library of Congress.