Seeing in new ways
Evolving technologies not only provide
unprecedented access to a variety of cultural artifacts but alsomake it possible to see these artifacts in completely new ways.
Thanks to high-end digital imaging, we can examine and compareancient cuneiform inscriptions with new precision and clarity.
University of California, Los Angeles, and
Max Planck Institute, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (2005)http://cdli.ucla.edu/; InscriptiFact and University of Southern
California, West Semitic Research (2004)
(External Link) .
We can see the
much-damaged manuscript of Beowulf in a way that renders the textmore legible than the original, and we can “peel back” successive
conservation treatments to see how the varying states of theartifact over time have influenced interpretation.
Other
ambitious and comprehensive editing projects reproduce the complexgenealogy of a medieval text
University of Virginia, The Piers Plowman
Electronic Archive (2005)
(External Link) .
or
recreate the many sources and states of the works produced acrossan entire lifetime by an influential nineteenth-century author
working in the age of print.
University of Virginia, Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The Rossetti Archive (2005)
(External Link) .
Three-dimensional
modeling makes it possible to recreate Roman forums,
University of California, Los Angeles,
Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (2005)
(External Link) .
medieval cathedrals,
University of Virginia, Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities, Salisbury Project, CathedralModel (2005)
(External Link) .
and
Victorian exhibitions.
University of Virginia, Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The Crystal Palace (2005)
(External Link) .
These
models may provide more than just a sense of place for the user—inthe process of building the model, scholars often learn surprising
new things about how the originals must have beenconstructed.
Digital video reformats fragile film and thus
gives us access to rare footage of dance performances from theearly decades of the last century.
See, e.g., the Library of Congress’s
American Memory site’s List of Variety Stage Films
(External Link) .
Mapping
technology allows us to understand the rapid spread of religioushysteria in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the seventeenth
century
or
to observe the evolution of the built and natural environmentaround Boston’s Back Bay over two centuries.
University of Virginia, Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities, Evolutionary Infrastructure(2005)
(External Link) .
The Valley of
the Shadow project contains extensive records in the form ofdigitized diaries, letters, newspapers, statistical records, and
photographs and other images of the period leading up to andfollowing the Civil War; it also has animated maps of battles that
visually reconstruct troop movements, points of battle engagement,and other data drawn from army and navy records of the time.
These and other digital projects show how
digital technology can offer us new ways of seeing art, new ways ofbearing witness to history, new ways of hearing and remembering
human languages, new ways of reading texts, ancient and modern.With some extension, the same infrastructure used for such projects
can also allow us to work in collaboration with distant colleagueswho provide complementary expertise, and whom we may meet
face-to-face only rarely. And all of this is about access: accessto colleagues; or access through digital representations to
distant, damaged, or disappeared physical artifacts; orintellectual access to the meaning or significance of these
artifacts.