Catalog of Digital Manuscripts

The Chronicle reported Tuesday about the Catalog of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. This is a simple, lovely new resource developed by a UCLA professor of English, Matthew Fisher, to identify and index the digital manuscripts that are currently scattered across the web and difficult to find.

It’s a very simple idea, and not one designed for its commercial appeal but surely one that could usefully be applied to,  say, North American buildings built before 1800, referencing HABS, statewide surveys, etc., and including fields for name, location (ideally in lat-long format), date, and a link to the resource. It would be simple but labor-intensive to build, and a major boon to scholars and students of early American architecture.

There’s so much material available, I guess we’re back to needing Yahoo!, at least for scholars.

Digitization and Disciplines

Willard McCarty’s recent post to the Humanist discussion list, number 22.008, was a response to a 1984 talk by folklorist Bruce Jackson, “Things That from a Long Way off Look like Flies,” on the history of folklore as a discipline and the nature of folkloristic evidence. Willard’s post, “The Fragility of Boundaries,” ended with the following observation:

The manipulatory abilities of our digital tools…are of course just the thing to translate anxious fragility of categories into amazing agility for categorizing and re-categorizing raw material. That much is plain. But what about the equally plain fact of the (truly) exponentially increasing volume of data? The problem, it seems to me, is not the hermeneutic nightmare of arbitrary, unjustifiable choice but the ease with which evidence for just about anything may be found. As Northrop Frye used to say, given enough data any statement can be connected with any other statement. Now we actually have the data, at the push of that lovely button.

Willard’s post will be archived, eventually, here. Bruce Jackson’s talk, published in the Journal of American Folklore, is available for subscribers to JSTOR. My own response, as posted to the list, is as follows:

I am reminded of two bits of advice from my academic training, both of which seemed massively intimidating at the time, and therefore memorable. The first was from an undergraduate literature seminar: “pay attention to everything.” (‘Really, professor? Everything?’) This was a mandate, of course, to read closely but also to be alert to the wider social world in which the written word is embedded.

It was repeated in a graduate-level seminar on material culture, through Ian Hodder’s Reading the Past. Hodder describes context as “the totality of the relevant environment,” which, for the purposes of archaeological interpretation, is always a subset of that totality: that portion of it that is accessible to the interpreter. Scholars have always had to decide what is relevant to the explanation of a thing, and these decisions represent boundaries.

Disciplines, then, are the product of long-established patterns of boundary-drawing. Scholars of architecture long held that all that was relevant to any discussion of a great building was the form of other great buildings (Pevsner was famously explicit about this: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln cathedral is a piece of architecture”). In time, with the emergence of architecture as a profession, attention turned to the biography of individual architects as a significant piece of evidence. Not relevant, however, were questions of contemporary social and economic practices, so it has only been in the last 30 years or so that slavery, for example, has been introduced into discussions of Virginia’s plantation houses, or gender relations into the study of domestic space.

Richly networked digital evidence represents, surely, a greater subset of relevant material than what a single researcher has previously had at hand. What this situation demands is that scholars who work digitally are self-conscious, and explicit, about how they draw those boundaries, which potentially extend quite a bit beyond where disciplinary habits might once have drawn them. I’m not sure that this situation shows the fragility of boundaries so much as their malleability. I will continue to study buildings; another will concentrate on novels; some others animals. If everything is digitized, everything is available as context, so our choices may be made more freely about where we situate our subject and how expansively to draw our boundaries.

But digitizing everything is a more serious problem for some pieces of evidence than others. For those of us who work on the material world, or who understand the material world as a meaningful aspect of context, digitization is far from straightforward. I share Bruce Jackson’s envy of literary scholars, whose subjects can be dis-embodied from their physical carriers and remain computable in a useful (if imperfect) way. Scanning a building, or a fork, or a landscape, is quite a different matter, as the results are very poor substitutes, as evidence, for the original. As with folklore, material evidence is always mediated and always collected according to contestible assumptions about what is significant.

As we learn to do research in an ever-expanding environment of digital evidence, we should be mindful of how that evidence has been collected, which varies significantly according to subject (or, if you like, discipline).
 

A Blog? Seriously?

How can anyone with any claim to scholarship spend time on something as seemingly frivolous and self-absorbed as a blog? To be sure, there is no shortage of dreck on the web but a weblog is no more and no less than a medium for written communication and therefore a useful tool. I have taken up this tool for two reasons, both centered around the utililty of computing for architectural history.

First, there is little understanding evident among my peers about the potential of digital technologies for architectural research. Our friends in history, archaeology, architectural design, literary studies, the social sciences, and even art history have begun to explore digital possibilities for their work with much more enthusiasm. So, I hope, this blog can help shine a little light on what architectual historians have to gain from computers.

Second, I want to explore, through writing, the possibilities of working digitally and the larger implications of rendering buildings in digital form. What is gained or lost in representing architecture in a digital photograph, or a digital model, or a database? What happens to our work as its publication moves from print to digital, and from the library to the web? To help understand these questions, I am beginning to explore the history of architectural representation in writing, drawings, and models to help me place digitization within our particular disciplinary context.

My hope is that short posts on particular digital topics–imaging, CAD drafting, database construction, for example–will, over time, develop as useful web-based reference materials for architectural research. I have posted several notes to email discussion lists on some of these subjects over the last few years, and given advice to friends privately, but this material is not widely available even though experience suggests that it should be.

Finally, I hope that the discipline of writing short public pieces on a regular basis will help me clarify my thinking on architectural representations and motivate me to push my research along. Because I work in a museum, I do not have a regular audience of students for testing ideas but a blog seems a fine venue for semi-baked notions that are not ready for a conference paper or publication. The very qualities that make blogs seem to lack seriousness (they are unvetted, spontaneous, and ephemeral) are the same ones that make them an ideal testing ground for new material.