tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883291738125908596.post161488926581103165..comments2024-02-06T00:24:17.205-08:00Comments on Text Technologies: The Broken Book I: Getty Exhibition 'Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures from Church and Cloister'Elaine Treharnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08771494133960076143noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883291738125908596.post-87370686756964582502013-11-27T12:21:52.987-08:002013-11-27T12:21:52.987-08:00Elaine, I find this entry lovely and sad, much lik...Elaine, I find this entry lovely and sad, much like my own standard operating disposition on these interesting questions—bittersweetly exciting and concerning. The last sentences of your essay here poke at something that’s been bugging me for a few years: ‘The real object is displayed at The Getty, ironically, as if it were digital—chopped up into its consistent parts, browsable in no defined order. And while it is a wonderful opportunity to see up close the details of the manuscript’s folios, one wonders what impression modern viewers are left with of this rather lovely, but here entirely decontextualised, set of materials.’ I couldn’t say anything better or more evocative, but it is the ‘as if’ and the modern viewers’ ‘impression’ that are remarkable. The Getty is providing a kind of mediated access to the book—an amazing opportunity to see it up close, in detail (in ways no medieval reader would access it)—and yet the book has become a kind of atomized dispersal of screens. The Getty fundamentally has made the physical book a virtual one, and as more and more books become digitally available—ubiquitous, accessible, shimmering so (not) close before our eyes—the pressures and drive of the general narrative (faulty and overly simplified as it is) that the digital suffices or supercedes the actual seems to be confirmed: an impression one might take away is that the medieval book works ‘as if’ it were a digital one. That this is materially posited by such a prestigous institution only reinforces the need—so well addressed here by you—to at the very least think hard about what we are doing when we digitize books and other aesthetic objects that depend so much on their physicality, corporeality, and tangibility for a great deal of their historical meaning.MTHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07870369916924909923noreply@blogger.com