Digital technologies have made the wonders of ancient manuscripts more accessible than ever, but there are risks and losses too
Retrieved on:
Thursday, February 8, 2024
Library of Congress, Handwriting, Justice, Computer, JPEG, Ink, Collection, Dog, British, Language, Translation, Darkness, Bible, Manuscript, Printing, AI, Tourism, System, Spirituality, Element, Smoke, Book, Abbreviation, Identity theft, Congress, Archive, Digital, PDF, Tablet, Dust, Rhysida, Painting, Water, Pet, Shorthand, Learning, Beauty, Library, Knowledge, Digitization
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.