Digital technologies have made the wonders of ancient manuscripts more accessible than ever, but there are risks and losses too
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목요일, 2월 8, 2024
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And even if some few have somehow survived, they are moth-eaten and in a state of decay, and remembered about as well as if they had never existed.
Key Points:
- And even if some few have somehow survived, they are moth-eaten and in a state of decay, and remembered about as well as if they had never existed.
- By making the manuscripts into a book, he would preserve the knowledge they contained – but not the manuscript, not the artefact itself.
- He does not mention how difficult his Byzantine manuscripts were to read and transcribe, even for someone familiar with the language.
- Every manuscript is its own text, its own space of knowledge, and an irreplaceable part of our shared cultural histories.
Preserving the Past
- Our knowledge of the past, and the wisdom we can gain from it, is bound in material objects – whether manuscripts, paintings, ruined buildings or clay pots – that are decaying.
- What will we preserve of the past?
- We are lucky if we can now read a text in 50 manuscripts.
- Read more:
Uncovering the mysteries of The Book of Kells – from myopic monks on magic mushrooms to superhuman detail
- Manuscript tourism became a popular activity for wealthy scholars like Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), whose collection became the core of the British Museum’s collection.
- Of course, many of these collectors simply stole or smuggled what they wanted from struggling monasteries in what are now Greece, Sinai and Israel.
- But their work made possible the rise of printed editions of classical and medieval works.
- Our modern editions of the Bible and the Iliad, for example, do not exactly match their underlying manuscripts.
Read more:
Dogs in the middle ages: what medieval writing tells us about our ancestors’ pets
Digital decay
- Even if we prefer the edited versions, printed books decay faster than manuscripts, and take up just as much space.
- Print does not solve the problem of preservation; it only postpones it.
- In the 20th century, digital scanning tools and computer-based storage seemed to offer a new kind of solution.
- Second, digital images are often in proprietary formats, meaning that without the library’s viewing software you cannot actually examine the manuscript.
- The digital format is still chained to its digital shelves in a private space.
- Third, as a recent cyber-attack on the British Library demonstrates, the digital space seems not to be safer than the physical one.
- The digital library space, with its proprietary viewing software and its specialised file formats, is now shuttered.
Conservation and accessibility
- Yet physical conservation comes at the expense of accessibility.
- We can, however, use advances in AI and computer technology to improve approaches to digital conservation and enable wider access to the uniqueness of individual manuscripts.
- To avoid digital decay, we need to devote the same attention to digital conservation as to material conservation.
- Images of manuscripts would then have a readable text and all the unique elements of the material original – its decorations and artistry, its errors and doodles.
- In this enhanced digital form, manuscripts could come to local museums, libraries and galleries, where they would be accessible to everyday visitors as well as specialists.
- But unlike him, we can now offer the experience of the manuscript as well as the text, and to a much wider audience.
Jonathan L. Zecher receives funding from the Templeton Religion Trust.