Talk at workshop 'Scotland's National Collections and Digital Humanities', 14 Feb 2013

1. The Purpose and Value of
Digitisation
Andrew Prescott, King’s College
London

2. Utrecht Psalter, produced in Epernay between 816 and 823

4. Silver nitrate photographs of the Utrecht Psalter commissioned by
the British Foreign Office to assist in dating the manuscript, 1872

6. Photographs of the
Utrecht Psalter made in
the British Museum
using the autotype
process, 1876

8. Detail from autotype
facsimile of the Book of
Kells prepared for the
New Palaeographical
Society under Bond’s
supervision

9. Lessons of the Utrecht Psalter
Controversy
• Potential of new technologies to explore historical artefacts
in new ways
• Importance of maintaining scholarly and critical approach
• Need to engage with technology, bringing specialist
understanding to bear
• Need to take opportunities as they present themselves…
• …while developing a strategic approach
• That strategic approach nevertheless in itself reflects many
cultural assumptions
• These are all lessons that resonate in current understanding
of digital humanities

10. ‘And then I once again blush for shame when I remember the librarian from Poitiers in
1948, who treated me with awe because I came from the city of the Utrecht Psalter, the
existence of which I was not even aware of’. Hans Freudenthal.

11. Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan, Inspiring Research, Inspiring
Scholarship; The Value and Benefit of Digitised Resources for
Learning, Teaching, Research and Enjoyment (JISC: 2011)
Digitised resources are transforming the research process:
• New areas of research are enabled
• Rich research content is now widely accessible through innovative
interfaces and user-friendly research tools
• The researcher can now ask questions that were previously not feasible
• Researchers can engage in a new process of discovery and focus on
analysis rather than data collection
Widespread access to digitised resources enhances education and
research at all levels of attainment. They contribute to the vibrant cultural
and intellectual life of the UK, promoting education and enjoyment for all
whilst bestowing a range of benefits to local and national economies

12. http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html

13. A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Back to the Real’, Times
Literary Supplement, 7 June 2013
• Digital surrogates more expensive version of
microfilm
• Make it difficult to assess material
characteristics
• Discourage engagement with originals and
provide excuse for libraries to restrict access
• Expensive activity which diverts resources
from more pressing priorities such as training
in palaeography and conservation of originals

14. A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Back to the Real’, Times
Literary Supplement, 7 June 2013
Is it worth it? Do the ends justify the
unquantifiable cost of the means? Digitization
appears to be proceeding unchecked and
unfocused, deflecting students into a virtual
world and leaving them unequipped to deal
responsibly with real rare materials. I suspect
that the combination of poorly prepared
students and reductions in library staffing levels
will make real manuscripts ever more difficult to
access directly.

15. Edwards:
The Codex Sinaiticus is an interesting test case for apologists of digitization. Last year I was told
that the Codex Sinaiticus site got about 10,000 hits a month. That might seem a strong
justification for digitization. But it seems doubtful whether even a small fraction of that number
have the appropriate training – codicological, linguistic and textual – to approach the work in an
informed way. If my audience analysis is even broadly correct, the British Library is investing
heavily not in scholarship, but in a new branch of the entertainment industry.

16. Lost leaves from Codex Sinaiticus found in St
Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt in 1976

17. Text of Mark 1:1 in the British Library portion of the Codex Sinaiticus under standard
light, showing corrections including insertion of the phrase ‘Son of God’.

18. The same section of Mark 1:1 under raking light, with transcription and translation

20. Google Books Isn’t Necessarily the Model
• Google Book search has become the pattern of ‘big digitisation’.
Manuscript digitisation such as Codex Sinaiticus frequently described
as boutique digitisation
• But a project such as Sinaiticus Is more complex in its aims and
ambitions
• With book search, assumption that the primary purpose of digitisation
is more quickly to locate information in the book
• With manuscripts, we are often as much interested in the physical
characteristics of the book as its contents. Images are therefore
important. Same applies to many other categories of material in
galleries, libraries, archives and museums
• Museums, library special collections and archives all share this
concern with using digitisation to investigate objects. Google Books
paradigm might not be best approach for wider GLAM sector

21. Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to reveal letters and
words concealed by nineteenth-century conservation work:

22. Two sets of transcripts made for
the Danish antiquary
Thorkelin, now in the Royal
Library Copenhagen, compared
with the original manuscript

24. William Kilbride, ‘Whose Beowulf Is it Anyway? ‘, Internet Archaeology 9.
http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.9.12

28. William Schipper, 'Dry-Point Compilation Notes in the
Benedictional of St Æthelwold', British Library Journal, 20
(1994), 17-34

29. The dry point note ‘In’ is not readily visible in this ‘vanilla’ digitisation of f. 27v of the
Benedictional of St Æthelwold. Ideally we need a series of images exploring different
aspects of this folio.

30. The words ‘Item alia’ under ‘thesauros’ on f. 63v are
barely noticeable on the ‘vanilla’ digitisation
Some very simple image processing would make
the dry point note clearer, if only the image was
downloadable (it isn’t)

32. Dr Adrian Wisnicki of Birkbeck College, University of London, working in blue
light at the National Library of Scotland. Dr Wisnicki and other members of
the Livingstone diary project spent 2 weeks at NLS taking images of David
Livingstone's diary and letters

34. RTI Scanning by
University of
Southampton team at
the Louvre, 2011

36. Moulds from James Watts’s workshop were 3D scanned by a team led by
Professor Stuart Robson and Dr Mona Hess from UCL, and the resulting 3D scan
was printed. The result was a previously unknown bust of Watt:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/9892

37. Another Critique of Digitisation
• It reinforces existing canonicities: illuminated
manuscripts; famous authors; historical
treasures. Little known, unfashionable, obscure is
overlooked
• We are too often only presented with a
single, controlled view of the object
• Access to and reuse of the images is often strictly
controlled and restricted
• It becomes an instrument by which the curator
can retain a role as gatekeeper and can control
our engagement

38. Whose Access?
• In digitisation so far, access has been one way traffic
• Digital images are presented in institutional silos, firmly
locked down and kept under a curatorial lock and key
which inhibits creation of an archive of different
perspectives
• If we present digital images in packages that are as
restrictive as printed forms, no surprise that we don’t
use digital images in different ways
• If scholars can freely
download, link, exchange, interrogate images, new
forms of scholarly discourse will emerge

40. Tinkering with conjectural restorations: a new type of scholarly activity?

41. digipal.eu

44. The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the
Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing
about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that
these collections have
The other important thing is to put the data in places where people can find it — making the
data, as it were, promiscuous. That means putting it on Flickr, Pinterest, that sort of thing; these
are forums people are used to using and commenting on, which they already use to build
datasets of their own
The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the
aura of the original

45. http://www.ted.com/talks/william_noel
_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archime
des.html

46. http://collection.britishmuseum.org

47. https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

48. • The purpose of digitisation is to explore objects in
new ways as well as increasing access
• It cannot achieve this purpose if we put the data
in straightjackets
• Don’t give one-dimensional views of objects.
Share data giving different perspectives on the
object
• When data is released it will be shared, linked and
analysed. It can’t be shared, linked and analysed
in a series of separate institutional silos
• The watchwords are:
openness, promiscuity, simplicity
• Share, and surprising things happen. We achieve
value

49. Reaching new audiences: Shedworkers discover illuminated
manuscripts: www.shedworking.co.uk