ABSTRACT
This chapter represents the first announcement of an idea that, under the rubric of Hilton Universal Code, became somewhat of an obsession and that continues today. The author's undergraduate thesis and his dissertation were both built with the primary assistance of a single research tool that, through such prolonged use, deeply informed his imagination and did more than any other item to imprint the possibilities of computers for scholarship. This tool was the Concordance to the Writings of William Blake edited by David V. Erdman and published in 1967 as part of the “Cornell Concordances.” With the assistance of the department’s recently hired academic professional, David Gants from the University of Virginia E-text Center, the author set out a graduate course in “Humanities Computing,” although with the less discordant title of “Literary Computing.”.
