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0.11 Seeing in new ways

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Seeing in new ways

Evolving technologies not only provide unprecedented access to a variety of cultural artifacts but alsomake it possible to see these artifacts in completely new ways. Thanks to high-end digital imaging, we can examine and compareancient cuneiform inscriptions with new precision and clarity.

University of California, Los Angeles, and Max Planck Institute, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (2005)http://cdli.ucla.edu/; InscriptiFact and University of Southern California, West Semitic Research (2004) (External Link) .
We can see the much-damaged manuscript of Beowulf in a way that renders the textmore legible than the original, and we can “peel back” successive conservation treatments to see how the varying states of theartifact over time have influenced interpretation.
British Library, The Electronic Beowulf (2003) (External Link) .
Other ambitious and comprehensive editing projects reproduce the complexgenealogy of a medieval text
University of Virginia, The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (2005) (External Link) .
or recreate the many sources and states of the works produced acrossan entire lifetime by an influential nineteenth-century author working in the age of print.
University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The Rossetti Archive (2005) (External Link) .
Three-dimensional modeling makes it possible to recreate Roman forums,
University of California, Los Angeles, Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (2005) (External Link) .
medieval cathedrals,
University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, Salisbury Project, CathedralModel (2005) (External Link) .
and Victorian exhibitions.
University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The Crystal Palace (2005) (External Link) .
These models may provide more than just a sense of place for the user—inthe process of building the model, scholars often learn surprising new things about how the originals must have beenconstructed.

Digital video reformats fragile film and thus gives us access to rare footage of dance performances from theearly decades of the last century.

See, e.g., the Library of Congress’s American Memory site’s List of Variety Stage Films (External Link) .
Mapping technology allows us to understand the rapid spread of religioushysteria in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the seventeenth century
University of Virginia, The Salem Witch Trials (2005) (External Link) .
or to observe the evolution of the built and natural environmentaround Boston’s Back Bay over two centuries.
University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, Evolutionary Infrastructure(2005) (External Link) .
The Valley of the Shadow project contains extensive records in the form ofdigitized diaries, letters, newspapers, statistical records, and photographs and other images of the period leading up to andfollowing the Civil War; it also has animated maps of battles that visually reconstruct troop movements, points of battle engagement,and other data drawn from army and navy records of the time.
University of Virginia, The Valley of the Shadow (2005) (External Link) .

These and other digital projects show how digital technology can offer us new ways of seeing art, new ways ofbearing witness to history, new ways of hearing and remembering human languages, new ways of reading texts, ancient and modern.With some extension, the same infrastructure used for such projects can also allow us to work in collaboration with distant colleagueswho provide complementary expertise, and whom we may meet face-to-face only rarely. And all of this is about access: accessto colleagues; or access through digital representations to distant, damaged, or disappeared physical artifacts; orintellectual access to the meaning or significance of these artifacts.
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Source:  OpenStax, "our cultural commonwealth" the report of the american council of learned societies commission on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. OpenStax CNX. Dec 15, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10391/1.2
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