This morning Aengus and I were discussing the problems solved and caused by digitally editing medieval manuscript prose. One of the points raised was that the digitised images we use to transcribe from can often be of a far higher quality than the human eye could see in real life without magnifying tools. As long as the digital file is large enough, we can often zoom in to see tiny details of the manuscript that would not normally be visible. We can look extremely closely at specific details such as letter shapes, scribal emendations and the exact abbreviation mark a scribe has used. Not only can we, the project team, look at these, users of the digital edition will be able to do the same. Users of a printed edition, on the other hand, would be unlikely to have access to the original manuscript. This is one of the benefits of digital editing of medieval texts. We can also look at the digital images whenever we have access to the internet, which is much easier than trudging to the manuscript rooms of far-flung libraries. We can look at the digital images as many times as we like and whenever we like. So do the digital images replace the need for the original documents? If the images we are using are more convenient and higher in quality than the original, why do we need to conserve the original at all? I can almost hear the reader gasp. The idea of no longer preserving these culturally very important documents which have been in existence for more than 700 years simply because we have a digital copy of them is something that would strike shock into the very core of many of those who study the humanities. But why? Are we keeping them simply for the sake of posterity? To adorn the shelves of libraries? What purposes do the originals serve if we have high quality digital images of them? Are digital copies safer than the original? I suppose to some extent they are – they are certainly less physically fragile than the original documents, but do they have the same lifespan that the originals do? Will people in 700 years have machines that can access the data we produce today just as we are able to read texts written 700 years ago? So many questions, and each one leads to even more questions. A very interesting discussion topic for a Friday morning.
