Skip to main content

IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 318: Digital Skin: Sensory Experiences of Digital Manuscripts, I

Monday 3 July 2017, 16.30-18.00

Sponsor:Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute, University of Glasgow
Organiser:Johanna Green, Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute, University of Glasgow
Moderator/Chair:Johanna Green, Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute, University of Glasgow
Paper 318-aDigitising the Digit: Imprint and the Lasting Impressions of Medieval Hands
(Language: English)
Hollie Morgan, School of History & Heritage, University of Lincoln
Index terms: Charters and Diplomatics, Computing in Medieval Studies, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Technology
Paper 318-b'Whose Written Heritage?': An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Making Multimodal Miscellanies at a Public, Urban, Minority-Serving Institution in the U.S.
(Language: English)
Katharine Jager, Department of English, University of Houston-Downtown, Texas
Melissa Torres, W. I. Dykes Library, University of Houston-Downtown, Texas
Index terms: Computing in Medieval Studies, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Teaching the Middle Ages, Technology
Paper 318-cNecromancing the Archive
(Language: English)
Bridget Whearty, Department of English, General Literature & Rhetoric, State University of New York, Binghamton
Index terms: Computing in Medieval Studies, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Teaching the Middle Ages
Abstract

Much early scholarship discussing manuscript digitisation often focused on the sense of 'material loss'; digital manuscripts were dangerously mislabelled as 'surrogates' that provide access at a cost, and failed to provide the audience with the contextual and sensory experiences of the original. Among the textual distortions oft lamented were the absent sense of weight and size of a codex, the feel of the parchment between the fingers, the play of light over an illuminated initial, the sound or movement of the turning page when a manuscript is transformed by technological intervention from analogue to digital. However, when we digitise, we do not replicate; rather, we create an entirely new digital object with its own materiality. Emerging scholarship in this area now celebrates the potential for sensory gain offered by these digital transformations, arguing that immersive technologies allow increased audience interaction and engagement, and suggesting that the latest digital developments no longer limit us to simply point, click or scroll, but to touch, tap, pinch, swipe, and rotate the digital object in ways simply not possible with an original codex - or with 20th-century text technologies (e.g. microfilm, CD-ROMs, early online digital editions). Following the Kalamazoo ICMS 2016 session ‘Digital Skin: Sensory Experiences of Digital Manuscripts’, we seek to capitalise on those 2016 discussions of the blurred lines between the human/digital experience of written heritage; here, we present two sessions of papers that question what it means to encode meaning onto different (digital/virtual) spaces thus creating a new 'digital skin'. This second session discusses the emerging (digital) opportunities for examining how we engage with the textual object, creating new materiality and embodiment.