New: The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts

Posted by mdever on July 1, 2020 in archival research, archives, Cultural Heritage, digital preservation, digitisation, digitization, imaging technologies, manuscripts, materiality, Publication, research

A new book by Cornelis van Lit investigates how we might think about the materiality of digitized manuscripts. Of particular interest may be the chapter ‘The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts”. Often distinctions between analogue sources and digital surrogates turn on the latter’s apparent loss or lack of materiality, a proposition that is challenged here. This interesting contribution to discussions of the nature and status of digitized manuscripts is available as a chapter to download or read online in the open-access publication Among Digitized Manuscripts. Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World from Brill.

From the chapter:

“When it is time to disclose our sources, we refer to the actual, material manuscript and seem to forget we ever looked at digital images. Can we identify the digital surrogate so strongly with the material artifact? Or should we say that the two have nothing to do with each other? After a discussion of how digital resources are being incorporated in a paper-based scholarly discourse, I shall discuss these two positions. I shall conclude that both are untenable. Instead, for evaluating the use of digitized manuscripts we need to describe their ‘digital materiality’.”