Digitised
manuscripts change the way we learn
Digital preservation and translation of old
manuscripts has expanded and democratised access
In an 1816
sonnet, the English Romantic poet John Keats describes an autobiographical
episode of looking at the English translation of the Greek poet Homer, the
revered author of epics Iliad
and Odyssey. “Oft of one
wide expanse had I been told,” confesses Keats’s narrator, “yet did I never
breathe its pure serene.”
Though
widely read and rigorously curious, akin to “some watcher of the skies”, Keats
had received no formal literary or classical training, and couldn’t read Homer
in the original. Thus, experiencing Chapman’s translation “speak out loud and
bold” from the 1616 folio was like the thrill of having “a new planet swim into
his ken”.
Others in
his environment, who had not suffered the same limitations of access to
classical texts, had little appreciation for his discovery. The flamboyant and
aristocratic Lord Byron was among them, lampooning Keats for “contriv[ing] to
talk about the Gods… without Greek”. Another contemporary dismissed him as a
“vulgar Cockney poetaster”.
Democratising
access
At the time,
this democratisation of knowledge and access to the classics without the
attendant linguistic training had its detractors. Two centuries later, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
remains relevant. For knowledge is far from democratised, and the institutions
— archives, museums and universities — keeping it confined to a privileged few
have regularly adopted new technologies, such as intellectual property regimes,
to guard their turf.
Fittingly,
these same institutions have also taken the lead in expanding access to their
resources to the wider public. Digital preservation, translation, and
annotation of old manuscripts have made them available to those who cannot
physically travel to the First World institutions that house them.
For example,
the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South project is an
online repository of texts (oral, image, audio) from its holdings. These
include the English translation of the 1831 biography of Omar Ibn Said, a
Muslim man enslaved in North Carolina, which is the only surviving Arabic text
written by an American slave. Earlier this year, the manuscript written in
Said’s hand was digitised and made available through the Library of Congress.
Closer home
and to the contemporary moment, the 1947 Partition Archive — “a global digital
museum accessible to everyone” — has digitised and preserved more than 30,000
photographs, family portraits, and physical objects to complement their
collection of oral histories about India’s Partition. Accompanying Google maps
help graph the journeys on to physical space and contemporary borders.
New tools,
new questions
This
democratisation is not confined to preserving and uploading manuscripts.
Digitally available texts can now be subjected to questions through an expanded
toolkit. For example, my students in a course on Twentieth Century South Asia
at the University of Virginia used geospatial visualisation and mapping to
annotate historical maps and lay them on top of one other.
The exercise
made students appreciate maps as palimpsests, and drove home a central argument
in the course that national and inter-state borders in postcolonial South Asia
are forged, not natural, and results of recent historical processes. In an exclamation
that reminded me of Keats’s excitement, one student commented after the
exercise, “I understand now that maps don’t come as facsimiles from heaven!”
A manifesto
for the digital age
The
burgeoning discipline of digital humanities — an approach to humanistic enquiry
employing digital tools — has extended and reformulated old questions of access
and use for these new media.
In Digital
Humanities Manifesto 2.0, a collaborative document produced in a seminar at the
University of California at Los Angeles in 2008, the authors declare that the
ground beneath our feet has shifted. We now inhabit a universe in which “print
is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is
produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new,
multimedia configurations”.
For these
authors, the collaborative, open, and diffused Wikipedia is the best model: “it
represents a truly global, multilingual authorship and editorial collective for
gathering, creating, and managing information”.
And, here’s
their clincher: “Wikipedia wasn't invented at/as a university.”
Let’s
rejoice, but remain critical
We need to
remember that not all digital archives and tools are free. Many remain
paywalled or exclusive to the institutions and their partners. For example, the
1947 Partition Archive has only been able to make a fraction of its interviews
publicly available through Stanford University Library’s Digital Repository.
The ArcGIS software that my students in the US used for their map exercise is prohibitively
expensive for most public institutions outside the developed world. Training in
the languages of computer programming — though less exclusive than a training
classical languages in Keats’s time—is also not equally available to everyone.
I write this
as I am myself making a move from studying and teaching in the United States to
India. My experience of working with students on three continents, including
many who don’t have access to formal university education, study in
under-resourced institutions, or work with constraints imposed by state
censorship or extra-legal proscriptions on information access, has made me
sensitive to the relative usefulness and limitations of different digital
tools.
The most
valuable part of a digital humanities approach to learning is the space it
provides to think critically about and through texts and tools, and not take
them as value-neutral.
(Swati
Chawla is a historian and digital humanist trained at the Scholars’ Lab at the
University of Virginia)
Regards
Mr.
Pralhad Jadhav
Research Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Mobile @ 9665911593
