Haptic Encounters with Digitized Texts

As brick-and-mortar archives digitize their collections, improved access is often widely celebrated as the primary goal of such projects. To take one recent example, an article in Forbes touts the British Museum’s new 3D archive as “creating access to cultural heritage for the millions of people who can’t afford a ticket to London.”9 Increasingly high-quality digital scans and models of texts and objects seemingly open to a much broader public what was once relegated to scholars with a travel budget. Such archives serve “a mediating and immediating function in bringing the thoughts and actions of an earlier time into closer contact.”10 That contact can come at an immediate cost, with certain digitized archives defended by paywalls, as is the case with the Early English Books Online database. By contrast, open-access collections, such as the Folger Shakespeare Library’s digitized materials, are free to use. But beyond costs, access means much more than the ability to simply view rare materials.

What exactly does an accessible digital object give us access to? Scholars have sometimes criticized certain manuscript digitization projects as “window dressing” for major collections, while lacking a clear mode of engagement for users. Meg Twycross continues: “There is nothing wrong with advertising the attractions of our national treasures and making the general public and indeed students aware of and enthused about them; but one would like evidence that their audience is expected to proceed to the next stage of appreciation, which is to do something with them.”11 The question of exactly what is to be done with digitized manuscripts has been variously addressed. Twycross herself reports on her work in digital restoration of delicate materials. This critique sets up a more far-ranging inquiry into how digital archives balance the mimetic with the interpretive and, further, how those decisions effect scholarly engagements with digitized texts.12 Scholars, in turn, have to evaluate the extent to which digitizations are useful facsimiles or independent artifacts. The digital medium further informs the document’s bibliographic and cultural radiance, demonstrating digital materiality as “technology in practice,” wherein a text’s “phenomenological existence is inseparable from the process of interpretation.”13

Questions surrounding the access and uses of digitized manuscripts have also emerged within the context of the senses. Jonathan Wilcox, in the introduction to the edited collection Scraped, Stroked, and Bound, complains that while the “visual access that such productions provide is often stunningly good . . . digital facsimiles fail to engage senses other than sight.” How then, he asks, “can responsible scholars overcome the disadvantages of digital reproductions and more fully engage with the physicality of the book?”14 For Wilcox, the answer lies in “craft scholarship,” which opposes itself to digitized archives with an emphasis on physical experiences. For example, Wilcox gives a small group of scholars the experience of making book components such as parchment. He reports, “What got amplified was precisely what is lacking in digital reproductions. Rather than relating to the eyes alone, the hands proved utterly central to the crafting of books and this accentuates an awareness of the tactile. Books involve a touching of the past in the most literal of senses.”15 Certainly experiences like this can convey information about craft labor and offer a different sensory landscape. However, this perspective presumes a sharp binary between the tactile and visual, mapped on to the other sharp binary of material and digital, neither of which holds up to scrutiny.

The senses are never so distinct as they are in our linguistic taxonomies, and the digital may unexpectedly extend their historical entwinement. In Western culture, touch and vision have long been imbricated. In the Catholic mass of the early sixteenth century, for example, congregants experienced a mediated form of touch by viewing the consecrated host while its handling was limited to priests.16 Touch was highly regulated in a way that, when combined with the visual dramaturgy of the mass, developed a complex dynamic of involvement and exclusion.17 Jonathan Crary looks to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a period when vision was particularly apt to be “conceived in analogies to touch.” He notes in particular how Denis Diderot “resisted treating any phenomenon in terms of a single sense.”18 These early insights are borne out in history of the senses research that challenges “the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the presupposition that we know what we are counting when we count them as five (or more).”19 The senses all operate and mingle in the experience of a page, including, as Bonnie Mak asserts, digitized pages: “Like their analogue counterparts, these pages communicate verbally, graphically, aurally, and tactilely and are constructed in a material way that influences how they are read and understood.”20

Remediation shapes the sensual affordances of the digital interface as well as “the ontology of digital artefacts,” a phrase that pushes against the seeming neutrality or solely mimetic function of digitized materials.21 The papyrologist Ségolène Tarte recommends that, beyond highlighting the “purely visual aspects of the original artefact, the acts of digitization and visualization can choose to explicitly imitate the actions and procedures the experts adopt when handling an artefact.”22 Tarte imagines translating onto the screen the “kinesthetic approach” common in reading papyri, drawing the text as it is seen: “papyrologists establish a feedback loop . . . Their minds oscillate between the text as a shape and the text as a meaning. And a continuous negotiation takes place between the two . . . It is the embodied act of drawing the text that serves as a negotiation tool.” Tarte explains this approach as “an embodied model of cognition, where it is a physical interaction with the world that prompts a state of knowledge.”23 If scholars habitually engage in such sensed cognition when handling and interpreting historical materials, then digitization practices might similarly strive for such a model to help students and scholars explore the unique interpretive potentials of digital objects.

Colin Reeves-Fortney, a filmmaker and artist, likewise envisions the digital realm as rife with embodied-interpretive potential. Reeves-Fortney helped to create Stanford University’s Digging Deeper series, a pair of online classes that introduced the study of codicology and paleography primarily through online video instruction. Faced with the perhaps paradoxical challenge of conveying material experiences through an online course format, Reeves-Fortney attempted to reimagine the affective encounter that many researchers have with rare materials in the archive. Reeves-Fortney wanted to explore how film might cultivate a similar frisson, creating empathy between viewer/user and textual object. His films of rare materials avoid the idealized visual presentation of an archival object. As he points out, humans do not generally encounter books completely head on, nor are we, in many cases, able to use our own eyes, or even a loupe, to get as close as some high-quality digital scans allow us to get. And certainly if we want to get close to an object, we have to move toward it, not simply zoom on a screen. It was important to Fortney, in creating an immersive classroom environment, to balance the affordances of extreme visuality with the need to keep the sense of human scale and proximity to texts. In so doing, Fortney also reveals the aesthetics and intervention of the filmmaker, resisting the type of neutrality that the digital image can convey. From Fortney’s experience, these filmic encounters can cultivate empathy in physically distant students for their objects of study. This work tacitly suggests that the ontology of digital artifacts allows them not just to be interpreted but also, as Tarte claims, to “influence the real.”24

The Phenomenality of Digital Transcription

My course module did not begin with such ambitions. Rather, it sought to take advantage of open-access manuscript collections and available digital tools to teach students about paleography, transcription, and early modern culture. However, the experience of the module brought into focus all these questions of access, empathy, and their institutional preconditions. We used a transcription portal developed by the Folger to access the 267-page medical recipe book compiled by a Mrs. Corlyon across the first half of the seventeenth century.25 One of the two period handwritten copies of this manuscript is digitized and held at the Wellcome Library while the other is held at the Folger; a third is not digitized and is held at Arundel Castle. Researchers can thus bring together historically dispersed manuscripts for comparative study and can likewise perceive both distances and gaps in digitization by understanding which archives have not made their materials available in this way. Being able to access simultaneously two versions of this manuscript held in geographically disparate archives also better conveys the amount and significance of materials largely compiled by women, depicting on the screen the volume of such texts and better witnessing the extent of knowledge produced or disseminated by women during this historical period, a contribution that has long been neglected. This is one goal of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), which works with a number of different repositories to transcribe and make searchable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical and culinary recipe books and through which our class was able to transcribe portions of Mrs. Corlyon’s collection.

It is surprising that the simple practice of transcribing from a digitized manuscript can offer insights into broad concerns about the interpretive potentials of remediation, the sensory aspects of the digital-material, and the role of digitized texts in embodied cognition. But transcription is all at once an editorial, constructivist, and kinesthetic project. Digital transcription involves rewriting a manuscript according to certain conventions and tagging it according to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards. Transcribing handwriting often necessitates building an alphabet for a given writer’s hand, typing and correcting a draft transcription, and then adding tags. The process requires extensive attention to the linguistic and material features of a textual object, and given the number of text technologies involved in the transcription’s production, creates a mindset attuned to media specificity and change. It presents an opportunity for students to connect the practices of traditional manuscript scholarship with an interpretive posture toward the text technologies they employ. Transcribing from digitized texts can give users the opportunity to consider the theoretical questions raised by such remediations while also experiencing the embodied act of working with such materials. To access the Corlyon manuscript students could use the Folger Library’s LUNA image database or view the same images loaded into the library’s transcription portal. LUNA’s image archive sometimes presents openings of manuscripts, displaying both recto and verso in the visual context familiar to manuscript readers. In other cases, single pages are presented alone, a denatured view of the text possible only in the digital realm, where, as Andrew Piper has quipped, “all is recto.”26 In either case the viewer’s line of sight is unrealistically perpendicular to the page. The archive is not trying to replicate a physical encounter with the book. Students worked experientially to accomplish their task, becoming aware of the affordances and constraints of remediation. Several students articulated a critical resistance to this mode of research; nonetheless, the project encouraged them to wrestle with methodological and interpretive challenges of the digital artifact. The particular historical and material value of an early manuscript invited students to consider the sensory imbrications, particularly of vision and touch, of the screen itself. My students’ reactions demonstrate how an engaged digital pedagogy can facilitate a luminous, yet still critical, encounter with a rare historical object.27 Rather than privileging an auratic original document, digital transcription technologies can let students experience what Jerome McGann calls the “phenomenal event” of textuality.28

For nonspecialists encountering the period and its textual traces, the concept of presence becomes crucial. Its significance for the early modern period gets reanimated in thinking about how the visual and tactile combine in encountering digitized texts. If, as Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht has claimed, presence is more spatial than temporal, digitally navigating a manuscript display gives students an experience of presence different from their print anthology.29 These print editions, with lines sometimes broken infelicitously to accommodate a two-column imposition, are not material touchstones for understanding the period and its written culture. Working with manuscript recipe books accomplishes two things in terms of creating a sense of textual presence for students. First, just seeing the page as it was written in its period evokes from students words like “connection,” a feeling of contextually “knowing” and even having a sense of “intimacy” with the writer. Second, the mere encounter with the digitized manuscript page is surprisingly haptic. Students even sometimes described this in the slippery terms of “feeling.” One student reported that after having worked with the manuscript transcription “the texts seem more approachable and tangible.” Struggling to articulate the experience as both affective and even tactile, one student writes, “The handwritten documents definitely added a new feel to the texts and made them feel much more personal.” They find themselves looking for traces of the author’s own body—thumbprints or other signs of wear.

The process of reading becomes actively embodied as it moves from the eyes to the hands which render the words. One student wrote, “I read Corlyon’s writing and felt as if those words were being written right next to me.” Transcription accomplished in the student imaginary what my previous efforts to convey through example, lecture, and discussion never quite could: the beautiful and crucial insight that “the material dimension of the assignment—the high definition yet at times difficult-to-read images of real manuscripts—allowed me to consider the material nature of knowledge production and transmittance, and the role that this materiality plays in the history of language and knowledge as it is tied to language.”

That said, students do not generally conflate the experiences of reading a book and reading on the screen either. Some reported a range of frustrations with the distance they sometimes sensed from the scanned object. One student noted that “Having the manuscript online made it hard to connect even with the ability to view the handwriting closely. The digital medium almost cancels out the humanness of the writing.” The student echoes how given text technologies mediate certain differences between vision and touch: “vision is the experience of spatial separation, touch the experience of colocation.”30 At the same time, both sense perception and interpretation are, to varying degrees, about integrating body and environment through proximity (consider the metaphor of “close reading”), an imperfect process, and the recognition of which is a surprising byproduct of this form of digital pedagogy. Encountering manuscripts online involves a form of “mediate touch” that partakes of changes in medium, changes which create an amplified synesthesia of the visual and tactile as students use pencils, paper, keyboards, touchscreens, or the mouse to navigate, approach, and transcribe the digitized object, sometimes in ways that would be impossible in the nondigital realm.31

When we allow textual tools to display their constraints and encourage students to articulate them, students become reflective and, more importantly, comparative, users of media. Jessica Pressman and N. Katharine Hayles theorize what student comments imply: that comparative media studies can “break the transparency of cultural sets and denaturalize assumptions and presuppositions, bringing into view their ideological underpinnings.”32 By having students read a manuscript embedded in a digital interface, they address the friction between the technologies of the codex and of the screen, the different ways these technologies activate, and imbricate, touch and vision. They are forced to encounter and address their own embodied reading practices, moving toward the sort of critical disposition that Roger Chartier advocates for the history of reading: “Recognizing its diverse modalities and multiple variations is the first aim of a history of reading that strives to grasp—in all their differences—communities of readers and their ‘arts of reading.’”33

Transcribing digitized texts not only challenged students’ theoretical and physical perceptions of the media they use each day but also shifted their typical bodily habitus within the classroom. Students worked in pairs, sitting close together, eyes bouncing from computer screen, to overhead projection, to page, hands moving from pencils to keyboards to touchscreens. Their own voices formed part of the productive textual melee as they compared readings or enlisted the help of the whole group on a particularly tricky word. We used a large projection of a manuscript page, not so different from massive antiphonals (manuscript musical scores that guided group singing centuries ago) to support group reading and the type of public insights that define the intellectual standard and space of a classroom. One student took apart the benefits of this process: “Collaboration was a strong motivator for me in completing the transcription . . . because we discussed our thought processes and reached a consensus based on our experiences with the text.” This collaborative structure may likewise elevate the strengths of certain student groups. For example, Jamila Moore Pewu and Annelise Hanson Shrout, in their essay in this volume, discuss how first-generation college students are often particularly adept at working in teams. In so doing, the students themselves become a necessary “infrastructure” for the success of the project.34

Students were also compelled by the transcription portal that the Folger’s software offers, as they could more or less see their transcriptions joining the many other keyings of pages for the same manuscript. One student spoke to this sense of immediacy and community: “The process of reading a handwritten work and immediately producing a more usable document with the potential to share newfound information for research and analysis felt very satisfying.”

This sense of research accomplishment was not universal. One outcome of researching at a physical distance from archives or scholars doing interpretive work is difficulty in connecting the task at hand to broader research goals, something students noted. This disconnect is perhaps also enhanced by the Folger’s transcription portal, which sort of absorbs students’ transcriptions without giving them a sense of where they end up on the back end or, indeed, of what scholars might plan to do with them. This concern highlights a warrant of this volume, particularly explored in the chapter “Manifesto for Student-Driven Research and Learning,”35 that we need better thinking about the research communities that grow and change around given projects as they develop, giving particular consideration to diverse student constituencies and institutional and regional differences.

Working in the classroom with digitized manuscripts has helped me to reassess the connection between digital text technologies and critical reading. In the first iteration of this transcription module I was surprised to see the way the process of transcription benefits from the potential diversions of the internet. While students did use the OED online or Google to look up unfamiliar words, these resources supported rather than interrupted the focus and engagement both transcribing and tagging materials requires. Students noted reading the author’s work “so intently and closely.” In this case, the readerly demands of the seventeenth-century text reframe the affordances of its remediation. As one student put it, “There was a discipline involved in paying meticulous attention to the details of each word, each phrase, that brought about new habits in me as I approached these texts—a discipline that I think will stick with me.” Transcription also became for students not a mechanical but a creative process, offering them a sense of their own discoveries. Many times, as students interpret canonical texts in class discussion or critical essays, they model the insights of other scholars or their professors. The moment of transcription offered to at least one student an experience of actual archival discovery. He wrote that “there is a unique sense of accomplishment in deriving your own evidence from transcription. It grants you a different kind of authority in your research since it’s your own work at play, rather than just citing a scholarly source.” A focus on student abilities works to rectify what Roopika Risam in the chapter in this volume titled “Stewarding Place: Digital Humanities at the Regional Comprehensive University”36 identifies as students being trained through high-stakes testing to be “consumers, not creators, of knowledge.”

Importantly, students even began to move beyond the initial fascination with contributing to a scholarly domain to a critical awareness of the broader assumptions that underlie the Folger and EMROC’s research protocols. One student reflected,

I personally wonder about the security of such a system—with increasingly crowdsourced, semi-anonymous, lay participation comes an almost inevitable decrease in accountability and quality of work . . . To entrust any archive, digitally hosted or no, to people who have only just learned the word “manuscript” . . . seems perhaps a bit less than desirable.

This student’s unease may be warranted. In looking at the pages of the manuscript we transcribed, it is easy to see that many transcriptions have been abandoned mid-page, while others have keyings into the double digits. At what point does what is useful for students become an impediment to quality research?37 This student’s experience sparked metareflections on research practices in tune with current scholarly debates about how to most productively scaffold crowdsourced research.38

In all these reflections, students are engaging with and profiting from the nuances of access; calling up a digitized manuscript offers far more than a performed proximity to an object. And the majority of my students have never visited, and may never visit, an archive; they do not come to the exercise with prejudices about authentic or surrogate encounters with rare materials. Students experienced the primarily visual dynamic of the digital display as conceptually haptic and material. Their experiences translated into a broader awareness of the inscriptive, material, and contingent ways that texts were produced and circulated across our syllabus. Furthermore, especially for newcomers to early modern literature, this activity helped students to, as one reflection put it,

appreciate how our understanding of different historical periods stems from readings of historical documents that are both interpretive and material. By this, I mean that our reading of certain non-literary manuscripts like recipe books, miscellanies, etc., requires that we physically engage with the document, and grapple with it as a complexly formulated technology, even at the same time as we assess the content of the document with respect to our understanding of the social, political, economic, philosophical, and religious orders of a given time period.

We should perhaps not question but rather foster the sort of synesthesia or visual touch that digitized manuscripts enable for students, not seeing it as a degradation of presence, but as an important version of presence itself.

Scholarly Networks as Digital Humanities Infrastructures

Anne McGrail, in her pointed assessment of “minimal computing,” brings careful attention to how critical DH pedagogy needs to see the conceptual and interpersonal as deeply embedded within the pragmatic and instrumental, another version of hybridity within these teaching approaches. Emily Isaacson, a teacher and scholar working at a small, non-elite liberal arts college, recently brought similar attention to the financial and institutional pressures that profoundly limit the ability of professors and students to undertake work in DH even at many small, private institutions. Isaacson points out that small, non-elite liberal arts colleges enroll a significantly larger proportion of students who are first-generation college students and/or have lower academic achievement in high school than many public institutions.39 Isaacson and McGrail focus on the psychosocial barriers that might keep students at non-elite schools disenfranchised from DH’s vaunted experimentation and “productive failure,” and the same barriers can hinder professors. I work on the tenure track at a large, public, STEM-focused institution. We have many resources for work in digital humanities and a teaching load that enables our faculty to apply for, and often be awarded, large grants to pursue international DH projects. The spotlight on such resources for research, however, can overlook the economic foundations on which critical DH pedagogy is built. I have come to see my digital pedagogy in the context of how we might reconceive the role of large, resource-rich cultural institutions in improving not just access but also instructors’ sense of digital agency.

As an early modernist, I generally teach undergraduate and graduate surveys of pre-1800 literatures, often in classes that have both upper-level undergraduates and master’s-level students. Undertaking transcription of women’s manuscripts in my combined graduate-undergraduate seventeenth-century nondramatic literature class aims to expose students to not just canonical authors but also to texts and writers outside of the strictly literary. In reflecting on three years of teaching digital transcription supported by the Folger and EMROC, I have tended to focus more on student outcomes, soliciting the anonymous feedback on their experiences detailed above. Increasingly, however, I have come to recognize this extremely simple assignment design, which relies only on a computer and an internet connection, as surprisingly resource heavy, although not in the ways that we might initially expect. Recognizing the back-end work and resources that go into even minimal DH teaching can help practitioners better realize how well-funded, open-access institutions and less easily accessible professional networks are crucial forces in bringing DH methodologies to non-elite classrooms.40 Human connections are an unseen DH resource essential to many “minimal computing” projects in the classroom, recognition of which might help scholars and institutions dismantle the barriers that can sometimes make it difficult to bring DH approaches to a broader faculty and student community.41 In offering open-access materials, cultural institutions—whose missions are often quite different from for-profit tech companies—create a way around McGrail’s concern that “minimal computing” might inadvertently lead students to rely only on “overprocessed commercial platforms.”42 At the same time, the elite scholarly networks such institutions and universities cultivate can be harder to plug into.

My course’s module is relatively uncomplicated from a technical perspective but relies extensively on a well-resourced professional network. In the case study of my class, in order to set this technologically straightforward transcription module in motion, I first had to myself learn paleography. I had sufficient time to research and apply for a summer institute in paleography funded by the Mellon Foundation and run by the Folger. Such professional development would have been unthinkable in my previous position as a contingent faculty member at a large state school. I then needed to forge the professional networks that would open the way for my students to contribute to the EMROC/Folger transcription project. After meeting scholars at the Folger, I was able to follow up and request to be made part of the project. Again, my tenure-track status and institutional affiliation helped me gain access to these research networks.

It is important to recognize that higher education labor practices have downstream effects in the classrooms in both pragmatic and conceptual ways. Course loads, pay inequity, and poor contracts rightly dominate discussions of labor conditions in the academy. Relatedly, the challenges presented to scholarly networking by institutional inequity is an important component to considering how and why certain types of innovations do or do not occur in the classroom. When I was working off the tenure track it would have been impossible for me to have the time or the level of professional confidence and self-perceived credibility to pursue such collaborations. It is slippery and anecdotal to try to bring individual psychologies and their great variety into conversations about digital resources and critical pedagogy; certainly many scholars might not have had this same set of situational anxieties. Yet if “Seeing the research process both as it is for oneself and as it might be for someone else—what we might think of as a sympathetic research imagination—also lies at the core of archive-centric digital humanities,” we might consider how this affective disposition, facilitated by archival research, could lead into a better understanding of the human elements that make such archive-centric DH pedagogies possible.43 Students evidence this affective investment in the tools and terms of their research when they find, through transcription, a sense of contribution to a domain and a feeling of coexistence with the authors whose hands they study. Analyzing what we might broadly call the human within digital humanities pedagogy can reveal not just the haptic and interpretive possibilities such classroom approaches hold for students but the market-driven economies of professional connection and prestige that function as shadow infrastructures in fostering digital learning and research.

Notes

I am grateful to the students of ENG 530 who have generously offered to share their insights and experiences for inclusion in this essay. I would like to thank Colin Reeves-Fortney for his insightful conversation regarding filming of rare materials for online instruction. Thank you also to the team at the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective whose time and generosity made this experience possible for our class. I am likewise indebted to participants in the Folger Library’s 2017 symposium “The Embodied Senses” who broadened my understanding of sense history and to participants and audience members in the Renaissance Society of America 2017 conference panel “New Technologies and Renaissance Studies V: Texts and Code” who provided feedback on an earlier version of this essay.

1. This conversation pertains both to inequities among America’s institutions of higher learning and to global networks of digital humanities inquiry. Alex Gil and Érika Ortega discuss the latter, assessing how insular networks of scholarly communications emerge among countries with similar economic statuses.

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2. Gil and Ortega discuss this as a feature of new thinking in global DH, but it also has resonance for America’s educational hierarchies. For more on this topic, see the other essays in this part of this volume, all of which address the way conventional understandings of infrastructure leave out digital projects and pedagogies at less conventionally resourced institutions.

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3. The “complex technological translations” observation is from Mak, How the Page Matters, 63. For a cogent summary of some of the opportunities and pitfalls of digitization projects see Nelson and Terras, “Introduction,” 8–9.

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4. Although this piece does not take up the vital access questions raised by scholars of disability studies, in bringing attention to the nuances of our sensory taxonomies, aspects of this essay contribute to George H. Williams’s call to “broaden our understanding of the ways in which people use digital resources.” Digitized archives, with their emphasis on the visual, require far more work to create interfaces that do not, as Williams suggests many technologies do, “assume everyone approaches information with the same abilities” (Williams, “Disability, Universal Design”). At the same time, the hypervisuality enabled by high-resolution scans and zooming technology holds the promise of better access for certain users.

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5. Stommel, “What Is Hybrid Pedagogy?”

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6. Gil, “User, the Learner and the Machines We Make.”

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7. Sayers, “Minimal Definitions.”

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8. McGrail, “Open Source in Open Access Environments.”

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9. Bond, “Five New 3D Models of Ancient Artifacts.”

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10. Nelson and Terras, “Introduction,” 8.

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11. Twycross, “Virtual Restoration and Manuscript Archaeology,” 23.

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12. I borrow the paired terms mimetic and interpretive from Tarte, “Digital Visual Representations in Papyrology: Implications on the Nature of Digital Artefacts.” Ian Gadd, in “The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online,” discusses how Early English Books Online reshapes sensory dynamics, extending to its use of black-and-white scans, which even degrade the visual remediation for which digitized materials are so often vaunted.

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13. Shep, “Digital Materiality,” 323.

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14. Wilcox, “Introduction: The Philology of Smell,” 3.

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15. Wilcox, “Introduction: The Philology of Smell,” 7.

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16. Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, 35.

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17. Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, 34.

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18. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 58.

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19. Macpherson, “Introduction,” 3.

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20. Mak, How the Page Matters, 62.

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21. Tarte, “Digital Visual Representations in Papyrology,” 7.

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22. Tarte, “Digital Visual Representations in Papyrology,” 4.

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23. Tarte, “Digital Visual Representations in Papyrology,” 3.

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24. Tarte, “Digital Visual Representations in Papyrology,” 1.

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25. The Folger’s open-source transcription tool is called Dromio and is available on GitHub.

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26. Piper, Book Was There, 45. The photography department at the Folger uses many criteria for determining how a textual object is photographed, guided mostly by conservation goals.

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27. I sought and received permission from my students to share their anonymous reflections on this assignment in this article.

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28. McGann, The Textual Condition, 5.

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29. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, xv.

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30. Hopkins, “Re-Imagining, Re-Viewing, and Re-Touching,” 264.

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31. The phrase “mediate touch” is from Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, 33.

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32. Pressman, Digital Modernism, viii.

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33. Chartier, The Order of Books, viii.

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34. See pages 236 and 263.

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35. Miya et al., “Manifesto for Student-Driven Research and Learning.”

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36. Risam, “Stewarding Place.”

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37. EMROC addresses this issue by grant-funding paleographers or recruiting volunteer scholars to vet the initial transcriptions. Transcribers are recognized by their user names. The means by which to credit crowdsourced work is evolving. Transcribe Bentham (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/), for example, pledges to acknowledge transcribers in volumes created from the transcriptions of Bentham’s manuscripts.

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38. Melissa Terras, for example, discusses the need for crowdsourced transcription projects to be structured in such a way that “complex representational issues are preserved” as one step to assure that the project will be “useful over a longer term and for a variety of research,” 23.

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39. Isaacson, “‘[V]Olumes That/ I Prize above My Dukedome’: The Archive, Digital Projects,” 10.

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40. For a slightly different take on the substance and benefits of minimal computing, see chapters 9 and especially 19 in this volume.

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41. Sarah Catherine Stanley addresses these hidden infrastructures as she notes how digital humanists have “been deeply engaged in discussions about sustainable labor practices in the academy.” A recent conference at Florida State University takes up “Invisible Work in the Digital Humanities,” exploring how different participants in digital collaborations have shared or divergent goals based on often overlooked factors including “unequal labor” (iwdh.cci.fsu.edu).

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42. McGrail, “Open Source in Open Access Environments.”

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43. The quotation is from Burma and Levine, “Sympathetic Research Imagination.”

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Bibliography

1. Bond, Sarah. “Five New 3D Models of Ancient Artifacts That Are Changing How We Interact With Museums.” Accessed June 19, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/05/19/five-new-3d-models-of-ancient-artifacts-that-are-changing-how-we-interact-with-museums/#3cf6b3ec1e30.

2. Burma, Rachel Sagner, and Anna Tione Levine. “The Sympathetic Research Imagination: Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Accessed January 21, 2020. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/74.

3. Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994.

4. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

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