|
| |
Truth and Beauty in the Digital Era
From: The British Library
| By:
Alice Prochaska |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
What impact is the digital age having on our ideas of truth and beauty? How is digitisation changing our understanding of the past and its relics? And what new responsibilities do today's media impose on curators and educators? Using examples from recent important digital initiatives, Alice Prochaska, director of special collections at the British Library, reflects on electronic uses of evidence from the library's collections. |
 bout 180 years ago, the young but mortally ill John Keats wrote one of his most famous poems, "Ode on a Grecian Urn." He looked at the images of pastoral love painted on the sides of the urn, which had by then already lasted for more than 2,000 years, and envied the simplicity and permanence of the people depicted there. |
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. |
 | |
| John Keats. | |
For us, who have not a fraction of Keats's genius but are blessed with probably three times his life span, our vision of truth is even more complicated than it seemed to him. I would like to explore some of the ways in which recent electronic advances can bring both benefits and dangers in the way we deal with texts and images from the past. It may be that we will never supplant the original Grecian urn. But can we recover its message, as Keats believed we would? |
Truth as a contingent concept
The search for knowledge involves a search for versions of truth. The researcher selects evidence and interprets it in patterns relating to other things that are already known. Researchers in all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences know that truth is a contingent concept. For psychologists, art historians, specialists in literature or linguistics, and perhaps especially lawyers, the difficulty of establishing objective reality is a truism. What I would like to consider here is the practical relationship between certain sorts of evidence, the way we handle them, and their uses in the enterprise of establishing truth. |
Some fragments of beauty will put in an appearance, if only to justify the highfalutin title of this lecture. Both truth and beauty have become, I would submit, even more contingent concepts than before, at a time when we can manipulate appearances almost infinitely on our computer screens. And yet, the paradox is that we can also use this same technology to subject evidence which in the original is obscure or unreadable to new and intensive scrutiny, uncovering information that may have defied the curiosity of generations of scholars. |
In historical research, my own original discipline, there have been schools of thought which held it possible to establish an objective version of events in the past which could be tested against the evidence and found incontrovertibly correct. Historians today are more likely to say that we all ask the questions that interest us. Current events in our own times, and subtly shifting cultural norms, condition our own interest in the past and lead us to construct interpretations of the evidence which will supply the explanations we know we are searching for. |
In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a huge expansion of research into women's history, labour history and the history of race. Ethnicity and gender are now established features of the research landscape. Around the mid-1980s, when the Greater London Council and other metropolitan authorities in Britain were about to be abolished, there was a rash of interest among British researchers in the history and sociology of local government, especially London government. |
At about that time, a wholly new and very important branch of social studies developed, investigating the background to the AIDS epidemic. A current growth area is the study of national and regional identities. The point is that all researchers in every generation and each place select their subjects of study, and hence also the evidence they wish to use and the way they use it, according to preoccupations which are of their own time and place. |
The Lindisfarne Gospels
Moving back rather more than 1,000 years, the monks on Holy Island--or Lindisfarne, in the northeast of England--at the turn of the eighth century had their own understanding of the link between truth, as revealed in the Christian gospels, and beauty, which could be created by man to glorify his representations of divine truth. |
 | |
| A detail from the Lindisfarne Gospels. | |
The Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the greatest of the British Library's collection of manuscripts reflecting the major religions of the world, has survived extraordinary vicissitudes. Created by Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne to honour the memory of St. Cuthbert, and later transported across the sea for safekeeping from Holy Island to Chester-le-Street, it survived a shipwreck. It was preserved in the monastic cathedral at Durham from the end of the tenth century until the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, and was then seized by Henry VIII's commissioners (or so we presume) and brought to the Tower of London along with many other treasures of monastic civilisation from all over England. Somewhere along the way it lost its jewel-encrusted binding. |
From the Tower, it came into the possession, whether by gift, barter or purchase, of one of the great Elizabethan antiquaries, Sir Robert Cotton, who valued the manuscript not primarily for its beautiful illumination but for the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospels, which was written between the lines of the Latin text by the monk Aldred, in the tenth century. |
(A recent extraordinary development has now revealed, using a high-magnification binocular microscope, that some 60 drawings in which Eadfrith tried out preliminary versions of his flowers, birds and other images remain impressed in the vellum. Tempting as it is to digress, this is the territory of my colleague Dr. Michelle Brown, who announced her findings for the first time when she gave the 2000 Jarrow Lecture. Suffice it to say here that electronic developments are telling us a great deal more about this astonishing legacy of early English culture, thanks to Dr. Brown's scholarship.) |
This manuscript remains the earliest known translation of the Gospels into Old English. Sir Robert Cotton's heirs bequeathed his priceless collection of books and manuscripts to the nation in 1701, but before they could be housed in the British Museum, which was not founded until 52 years later, a calamitous fire in the heirs' home in Ashburnham House, Westminster, destroyed and damaged large parts of the collection. |
The Lindisfarne Gospels survived the fire, and today visitors come from all over the world to see the manuscript in our galleries. They seek it out not only as a document of great Christian significance but also because it is perhaps the best-preserved and arguably the most beautiful example of early medieval art in northern Europe. |
"Turning the Pages"
Until recently, only research scholars could turn the pages of the original manuscript, and then only if they explained why they needed to inspect it in detail. Now, using a system pioneered in the British Library, we are able to offer scholars and the wider public the chance to turn the illuminated pages electronically. They can inspect, with greater clarity than by looking at the original, the detail of the artist's work, with its complex abstract patterns incorporating stylised birds and other creatures, its evidence of cosmopolitan influences from as far afield as Byzantium, and parts of Aldred's translation. |
The "Turning the Pages" system brings to life more vividly, and potentially for far more people than ever before, this world-class treasure. We have represented it as faithfully as we can, and digital technology has enabled us to do justice to the original artist's and scribe's work in a way that has not happened since the manuscript was used as a treasured part of a great monastic library. |
The Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript and its digital version raise a series of more general issues about the representation of original material in the digital era. This is not the first time the British Library has disseminated copies of the manuscript: scholarly editions, a facsimile, a small book and a video about the Gospels have all been available for some time. |
The manuscript itself has been loaned--at considerable trouble and expense, since it is vulnerable and fragile--once to Durham Cathedral and once to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, where it is going to be seen again later this year. Meanwhile, there is a vigorous campaign in northeast England to return the original to what is held to be its "spiritual home." |
For the British Library, such transfer on a permanent basis is hard, if not impossible, to contemplate. It would involve a change in the law, since our foundation collections are inalienable; it would also remove one of the most important works from the heart of our collection of Christian manuscripts, which are the heritage of not just one part of England but of people all over the world. |
There are further arguments about "cultural restitution," including the danger that the national collections, where a critical mass of material can be made available together for scholars and the wider public, would become subject to an almost unending series of claims by national and regional patriots. This could drastically reduce our ability to provide ready access to an accumulated international inheritance, one that has been prized by millions of visitors over many generations. |
The role of the digitised version is central to these arguments. Now, at last, we can make available for any member of the public--at potentially numerous different sites, and eventually on CD-ROM and possibly over the Internet--the beautiful illuminations which are what almost all who love this manuscript want to see. But prohibitive costs and the potential damage that would be done by scanning the hundreds of pages mean that it is only the decorated pages, together with the Anglo-Saxon colophon, or explanatory note, on the last page, that we have been able to digitise. |
For scholars who need to read the rest of the text, the manuscript still needs to be available in a library, where it can be handled under carefully supervised conditions and seen alongside related material. The digitised version makes it possible, for the first time for all but the very few, to scrutinise the pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels as a work of art, and for the first time ever with enlarged and uninterrupted views of all details. |
The original artefact, displayed under glass in our galleries, cannot be used in that way. And yet, we must remain sensitive to the fact that even the new and wondrous "Turning the Pages" version is not the original. The manuscript itself, like so many other survivals from antiquity, has its own unique value: it is iconic, symbolic, irreplaceable. |
As far as the arguments about cultural restitution go, we have to take our stand in the end on the nature and role of national collections, the cost-effective application of rare expertise and expensive provision for preservation, and the value that a vast international audience places on seeing these treasures together. Even digitisation cannot perform the magic of locating the original in two places simultaneously. |
The manuscript of <i>Beowulf</i>
 | |
| A detail from the Beowulf manuscript. | |
The benefits of digital technology that I have just described are enjoyed by both the scholar and the general public. Another important treasure from the library of Sir Robert Cotton, the earliest known manuscript of the Beowulf legend, has also been digitised, this time in its entirety, and is transforming scholars' knowledge of the text. Unlike the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript, which was virtually unaffected by the fire of 1731 at Ashburnham House, the volume in which Beowulf was bound up was badly damaged, charred by the fire and then further damaged by water and the efforts of eighteenth-century conservators. |
Under the guidance of the great keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, Sir Frederic Madden, much of the Cotton Library, including this manuscript, was painstakingly conserved in the nineteenth century using what were then the most up-to-date techniques. Madden's work on the Cotton manuscripts included the careful and accurate collation of two sets of previous transcripts of the Beowulf manuscript, which is now part of the digitised package. |
The nineteenth-century conservation techniques had involved covering the charred edges of the manuscript with paper in order to stabilise it and to prevent further parts of it being lost each time it was handled. So even this careful work actually obscured some parts of the surviving manuscript. Only in the 1980s did it become technically possible to view and photograph the Beowulf manuscript under fibre-optic light, which revealed some of the missing letters. |
A collaborative project between the British Library and the American scholar Kevin Kiernan, of the University of Kentucky, bringing in also the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen, where there is a transcript of the manuscript made by a Danish scholar before the nineteenth-century conservation work was undertaken, has produced a full digital version. |
Now available on the Internet and on CD-ROM, it took the project team some five years (1992-7) to complete and mount this version. The technical and intellectual aspects of this endeavour are described by my colleague Professor Andrew Prescott in the British Library's compilation Towards the Digital Library: The Initiatives for Access Programme, which we published in 1998. |
If the digital version of the Lindisfarne Gospels reveals its beauty to the scrutiny of all who are interested, whether experts or not, what the electronic Beowulf does, in effect, is to present completely new information. It is in itself a primary resource--something more than the original, and in this respect something that only digital technology can produce. |
High costs are still involved in undertaking digitisation of a rare manuscript from scratch, whether by scanning from the original or using high-resolution photography or even microfilm and scanning from that. Each separate item or collection presented in this way tends therefore to have been selected because it represents some new intellectual or technical challenge. |
The International Dunhuang Project
Among the most ambitious projects in which the British Library is involved at present is the International Dunhuang Project. This collaborative enterprise has been sponsored to date by the Chu Ching Kuo foundation and the National Heritage Lottery Fund. It involves collaboration between scholars and libraries in Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Tokyo and Beijing. |
 | |
| Scrolls from Dunhuang. | |
Its aim is to reconstruct in a single digital database a complete catalogue including digital images of particular manuscripts from the scattered parts of an archive of classical China which lay sealed up and untouched in a cave in central Asia for nearly a millennium. The project officer, Dr. Susan Whitfield, described this collection in a lecture here last year, and I commend to you her book Life Along the Silk Road (1999) for its vivid evocation of the life behind the documents. |
The town of Dunhuang, in what is now Gansu province in China, lies at the fork in the ancient silk route along which traders travelled for many centuries between China and the population centres of southern and western Asia, and thence towards Europe. Because of its key position on the route, and despite a wicked desert climate, Dunhuang prospered and became an important administrative, cultural and religious centre in the first millennium CE. |
Buddhist monasteries were built using caves in the rock cliffs. It was one of these caves, sealed up for many centuries, that was opened by a Daoist monk late in the nineteenth century. He found there an extraordinary treasure trove of wall paintings, manuscripts and fragments from wooden writing blocks, the legacy of several centuries of life in the classical Chinese period. He led a series of explorers to this treasure. |
First among them was Sir Aurel Stein, a Hungarian scholar and traveller, naturalised as a British citizen, who brought back to his two sponsors, the British Museum and the India Office, fabulous collections of previously unknown material. The two Stein collections of manuscripts have for nearly a century provided raw material for research into Asian cultures. They are now brought together in the British Library collection. Meanwhile, there are large collections of further materials from Cave 17 in Dunhuang in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the National Library of China and the Oriental Institute in St. Petersburg. |
One feature of the Dunhuang material that makes it so important to scholars is the ancient custom of Chinese historians to write the official history of each dynasty at the end of the dynasty and then destroy the materials that the history was based on. It was only because, for reasons not yet explained, the caves at Dunhuang were sealed up and forgotten that their treasures remained intact. |
Ironically, it was modern travellers, hungry for scholarly trophies to take home to their sponsoring governments, whose search for knowledge broke up and dispersed the untapped riches of information contained in the Dunhuang site. It now falls to scholars of the new millennium to piece together in a single database what must be potentially one of the greatest single sources of evidence for religious, cultural and economic life in the classical period of one of the world's most ancient cultures. |
The Early Buddhist Scrolls project
The Early Buddhist Scrolls project presents another twist. Here, we are dealing with material from the earliest period of Buddhist history known to have been recorded, probably the first or second century CE. These are also the earliest recorded manuscripts from South Asia. The fragments were given to the British Library by an anonymous donor with a deep interest in the background of Buddhism, and came to us as tight scrolls of birch bark, rolled up inside jars. |
Birch bark is the most brittle and fragile of all writing materials. It took skilled and patient handling in the British Library's conservation studio to extract the scrolls and unroll them. Each one was taken from its jar and opened up with agonising slowness, the conservators wearing masks at one point so as not to blow away crumbs of birch bark with their breath. From there to digitisation was still a long process. |
The script was identified as Kharosthi, from the Gandhara region on the borders of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Each scroll was kept together, and fragments were matched up as well as possible, but since the scholars in the world who are familiar with Kharosthi script can be counted on one hand, the task was challenging even under the guidance of our experienced Sanskrit curator. |
Once unrolled, and after the separated parts of each scroll were matched to the body of the scroll as well as could be managed, the reconstructed scrolls were sandwiched between plastic panels and then photographed using a digital camera. Thanks to digitisation, it is now possible to manipulate images of the fragments on-screen, moving them around to match the script in order to reproduce the text as it was originally written. |
Richard Salomon, at the University of Washington in Seattle, undertook to unravel the mystery of the scrolls' contents, and the digitised versions were sent to him via the Internet. Building on the experience of the digitised Beowulf, this joint British Library/University of Washington project has taught us more about the limits and possibilities of digital technology as a resource for capturing fugitive or illegible primary resources. It is clear, for instance, that the presence of the scholarly expert is highly desirable, even sometimes essential, at the stage when the original is being photographed or scanned and the digitised image produced. Only Professor Salomon could tell us whether the image was legible or not: clarity on the screen is in the eye of the beholder. And this in turn brings us back to the question of truth. |
Up to this point, I have given just a few examples of how scholarly materials can be presented as evidence for study in the electronic era. The ways in which people construct knowledge are of course infinitely varied, and the opportunities presented by digital technology, like those of printing, are nearly as infinite. In the remainder of this lecture, I would like to explore very briefly the wider dissemination of this sort of raw material. |
Dissemination and education
This is the newest of the mass media and, like photography and television before it, it presents both immense opportunities for wider access to knowledge and also a whole range of questions about priorities and the ethics of what is, in essence, an uncontrollable medium. Part of the answer to the problem of control is to seize the opportunity on a large scale, as government is doing now by creating the National Grid for Learning. The hope must be that good-quality material available in large quantities will drive out or marginalise the less good. And this in turn presents enormous challenges to the producers of content. |
The educational possibilities of the World Wide Web have been appreciated for a long time. Given the impetus and funding now provided by government, there is an explosion of educational materials available via the Internet. Textual resources on the Internet are being built into schools' curricula. Amongst this material there already is, and will be in increasing quantities, historical evidence. |
The original raw material on which historical understanding is founded will be used not only for the history curriculum but as tools for teaching geography, citizenship, art, music, English literature and aspects of natural history and environmental studies. Much hangs on the way these materials are presented. There is a responsibility to ensure that evidence is not "cooked" by manipulation of the images, and, equally important, that it is presented in such a way that teachers and students can appreciate the context. |
Increasingly, materials can be made available in an interactive way--for instance, using some of the applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which have been pioneered by partners in the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). But if school students can explore and manipulate electronic data now for themselves, how much more important it is that they understand the context. When, for example, they create their own map of the nineteenth-century population of their town from digitised census data, they need to know what questions the census enumerators asked, and what sort of information they themselves might wish to add. |
The "metadata" of electronic materials--that is, the way in which the content is presented and explained--can be all-important. At one level, how can a school student be expected to read the original of the Magna Carta or understand its significance without knowing the background of the struggle between King John and his barons, or without a transcription of the text which makes it legible to modern eyes? Beyond that, the text will be of little value if there is no accompanying evidence to illustrate the way in which the Magna Carta has come to be seen as a foundation document of governmental liberties all over the world. |
For the more advanced student, a comprehension of the limitations of the Magna Carta itself, and of the importance of the interpretations that have been placed on it since it was first issued in 1215, are essential to fulfill the central requirement of the history curriculum, which is to understand interpretations and points of view. To what extent can and should the electronic image be accompanied by such explanations, and how far should the use of this sort of material in school classrooms be left to the unaided work of the teachers? |
Taking a very much more current example, and one that I cannot as yet illustrate from the library's resources, we look forward to receiving in due course the voluminous archive of the British statesman Tony Benn, MP, which he and his family most generously plan to transfer to the British Library at the end of his active political life. |
This archive can be used in any one of numerous multimedia packages, alongside other materials or as a separate product which might be entitled "Tony Benn's Twentieth Century." It would be presented as source material for students and for the general public that has an interest in British politics or in Mr. Benn's period in politics, from the 1940s to the present day. But here, too, questions of presentation are important. What other materials do we need to include? Is it our job, and if not, whose job is it, to present other points of view as well? What of the Denis Healeys, the Margaret Thatchers, the Arthur Scargills and so on? |
How can we make clear the work of editing and selection that will have been essential to boil down to a digestible small sample this mass of political correspondence, diary and reflection? And, as a more general matter of principle, how, in the digital era, can evidence selected to illustrate modern politics carry with it its own context? The context we select as contemporaries will be different from what seems important to future generations. It is so easy now to manipulate images, to present material that looks complete when it may not be or random and unselected when it may in fact represent a carefully chosen sample. |
The responsibility of the custodians of this material--its editors, its producers and its publishers--becomes even more complex and acute as the range of technical possibilities multiplies. Keats knew that he was looking at an original Grecian urn when he wrote his small masterpiece of a poem. Even he might have been the subject of some elaborate fraud, and the urn could just have been a contemporary forgery. But the cost and difficulty of producing any such deception with the tools at hand in the early nineteenth century would have made it extremely unlikely. |
The message Keats took from this beautiful and ancient object was one he found consoling in a world beset with unhappiness. He found there an innocence which the modern world had lost but yet could recover. We too can gaze on beautiful objects and works of art, and find truth and versions of the truth in the originals of books, manuscripts and images from the past, right up to the present day. |
In the nearly two centuries that have elapsed since Keats's lifetime, and in the more than two millennia since an unknown artist produced his Grecian urn, new technologies, from printing onwards, have enabled us to transmit and also to alter evidence. But now that we derive so much of our information from the computer screen, have we finally lost our innocence? Can we yet recapture the clarity of vision that enables us to look at a work of art and say, " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty', --that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"? |
|
| |
