Whearty 2023
Whearty, Bridget. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor. Stanford University Press, 2023.
Preface: Vanishing Act
But just because end users are not in the habit of seeing them does not mean that the labor and laborers are not there.
xvii
The sudden erasure of this creator’s hands—nearly fourteen years after she made this new digital copy of a nineteenth-century copy, of a sixteenth-century copy, of an older medieval book—powerfully demonstrates how digital copies are not static. They are complicated, changeable objects, and they each carry their own stories of labor, community, erasure, and care.
xvii INTRODUCTION Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor
In describing these objects as “digital manuscripts” I seek to emphasize how much hands-on human labor continues to be the story of medieval manuscripts, especially as they are copied into new media.
3
As digital archives continue to proliferate, we need a rigorous codicology for digital manuscripts and books, distinct from their analog, hard- copy originals. At the heart of this expanded codicology rest the same questions that we have long asked of digitized books’ analog originals: Who made this book? when? where? for whom? using what tools? to what end?
3
Schol- arship on digital books has conventionally positioned “the physical” versus “the digital” as though technologically mediated, visual access to medieval manuscripts is a new thing. But the metadata for the digital copy reveal how much that binary oversimplifies the media histories of digitized books. Far from a Gutenberg parenthesis, skipping over five hundred years to directly connect the pre- and postprint eras, the digital copy of the Ellesmere Chaucer is deeply rooted in—is in fact insepara- ble from—an array of modern reprographic technologies, not the least of which is print.
8
I do not deny the potent combination of affective and intellectual delight that can come of laying hands on hard-copy books. Yet the sus- tained focus on the intimate relationship between the book’s analog body and the scholar’s body attends to only two of the bodies involved in research labor. Generations of librarians, curators, and archivists who do the labor of cataloging and caring for collections, who make finding aids so that scholars can find our objects of study, who carry about hard-copy codices to and from reading tables—all of these bodies and labors go largely unacknowledged. The working bodies and expert contributions of digitizers, project managers, and library technologists are similarly absent from much humanities scholarship on digital man- uscripts. Both erasures are profoundly wrong—immoral from a labor ethics standpoint and incorrect for standards of scholarly rigor.
15
Across decades, we seem to perceive digitization as always-already new, somehow without history—standing outside of history writ large and lacking a history of its own.
16
A self-cons codicology of digital text pushes beyond retrospectively judging whether a project made the “right choice” (whatever that might mean) and instead seeks to understand why those choices were made. What larger social and institutional pressures made this the correct choice for these project-builders in this moment? What might that choice reveal about the larger structures in place that support the creation of digital manuscripts? And, perhaps most pressingly, what do these decisions reveal about the unseen humans behind the digital manu- scripts on our screens?
20
As my interviews with librarians, curators, and digitization specialists have shown, there are significant differences
21
around credit between a research-faculty culture that brands all indi- vidual contributions by name in order to quantify individual scholarly impact for hiring and promotion, and the cultures of collective labor and uncredited collaboration more common to galleries, libraries, and museums…
22
Thus, I want to be clear that I am not arguing for compul- sory naming of the workers involved in making digital medieval books. What I am arguing for is compulsory noticing.
22
As end users, we must learn to read into the absences in digital books the vivid presence of the many someones who did the labor of making them, in the same way that we know to read those same ab- sences in the bodies and histories of hard-copy books.
22
Too often, hu- manities researchers have seen the scribe who has been dead for more than half a millennium with greater clarity than the living digitizer who creates the digital manuscripts we use daily. Ethnographic, and at times autoethnographic, research can act as an important corrective to this.
24
The rhetoric of digital humanities and digitization can slip into techno-utopianism. Against these impulses, medieval writers’ insights into the labor, purpose, and limitations of bookmaking can serve as a useful corrective.
32 CODA. Glitch
…how much should the errors in digital manuscripts be treated as unique evidence of the digital book’s making, worthy of preservation? And how much should they be treated like coding bugs, glitches to be fixed, erased, overwritten? Under their pragmatic surface, these boil down to an ontological question: What is a digital manuscript—is it a book? a computer program? something else entirely? Common practices for addressing digital copying errors do not follow best practices for rare books or for software updates, but I will argue here that they—that we—sh…
217
Both medieval manuscripts and media studies seem to suggest that there might be value in not over- writing or destroying the moments where the seams and “mess” show through, because those glimpses of mess reveal the effort-filled per- formance that is always lurking behind our modern screens. Through deliberately preserving visible errors and glitches, digital manuscripts might better reveal how they—like their analog exemplars—are always touched by humans and shaped by unseen hands.
225
I dream of digital collection management systems that would allow for correction while also preserving some version of those errors, cre- ating both better digital manuscripts and a visible record of the mul- titemporal community that reaches across days, years, and decades to sustain and care for shared digital cultural heritage.
228
While it may not, itself, visibly layer errors and corrections over each other like the medieval copying errors described earlier, this kind of VCS could allow for modern digital copying errors and corrections to coexist as parallel versions of the same project, offering deliberate snapshots of the ongoing, multiyear project of digital assembly—the way historical photographs of a building can usefully document specific stages of con- struction and renovation.
229
It’s that when changes are made to digital manuscripts, they should not be invisible. They should be accompanied by a public, visible, and detailed record of what those changes were, when and why they occurred.
230
Standardizing version control in digital manuscript collections fixes that instability and uncertainty, helping work on digital objects maintain greater rigor and accuracy—even as the digital objects we study continue to be corrected, augmented, and changed.
233
…this kind of public versioning might also help preserve a record of the very real “mess” of manuscripts, foregrounding across the centuries, media, and versions the vast interconnected communities of human contributors and showcasing how the maintenance and care work for digital manuscripts are ongoing.
233