“materiality [is] a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers”
Nancy Katherine Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”, Poetics Today 25:1 (2004)
This semester, the Digital Humanities lecture series started with a presentation by Dr. Elena Spadini from the Universities of Bern and Basel about the role of materiality in scholarly editing and digital editions.
Drawing from my background in history, this post links Spadini’s reflections about materiality in editing to the role of materiality in the archive and the work with sources, inspired mainly by Arlet Farge’s “Le Goût de l’Archive” from 1989.
Digital Materiality?
The main question that Elena Spadini discussed in her presentation was:
Can we take into account materiality when we decide what do we edit, and why and how do we create a digital edition?
(emphases in the original)
To address this question Spadini began with a quick overview of scholarly editions. In general, scholarly editions aim to establish a reliable text following explicit principles. Often including “the circumstances of the creation. its distribution, of its transmission and/or its genesis”. Now material philology has a strong focus, especially on the transmission history of a text – including the social context it happened in and its use, as well as the “technological conditions of its production, use and transmission”– and uses those elements in addition to the study of the text. Thus, material philology connects philology, the study of the textual content, with media studies, the study of text mediation (e.g. technological aspects of production and distribution).
Spadini presents the usage of material information for digital editions based on three different case studies, e.g. by creating genetic text relations or including aspects of the changing text mediums (in this case hardware and software). However, in most digital editions, materiality is not prominently addressed, or only as an addition. The most obvious examples of digital materiality are facsimiles of the texts, which do not always add substantial information.
The Chance of Materiality
Over the last decade, practical aspects of working with physical sources have changed through the accessibility of digitalized sources. However, questions of materiality remains present.
In historiography, there is probably no text that depicts the atmosphere in an archive and the feeling of the physical touch of sources as vivid as Arlette Farge’s “Le Goût Archive” from 1989. In the comment to her book in WerkstattGeschichte, Alf Lüdcke writes that through the physical work with sources, history becomes concrete and sensible, literally through touch and smell, or as he writes history becomes “greifbar” (graspable).[1]
On just a few pages, Farge condenses the power of materiality in the archive. Material traces provide the chance to “touch reality” («Wirklichkeit zu Berühren»). However, the reality of these material traces is limited; without the interpretation of their present meaning and reconstruction of their past significance they call only attention to themself. [2]
The Privilege of Materiality
Farge’s depiction of materiality shows that experiencing materiality is not only a chance, but also a privilege. Material on site is not equally accessible to everybody. Digitalization has helped and can continue to help to make sources more accessible. However, this includes not only making the texts available but also the material information of the sources in ways that allow users to grasp both the chances and limits of them and to give them the option to understand the source as an object rather than only as text, if reasonable.
Materiality?
Recently, I discussed a project idea to establish a private family archive. The project includes the digitalization of documents. During the discussion, the question of what to do after digitizing the documents arose. Due to the nature of most of the material, one idea was to only preserve the digital version.
This leads us to the question: Is the digital materiality that we are increasingly exposed to today, and will probably encounter even more in the future, still the same materiality as Arlette Farge described in 1989? Either because there is no possibility of returning to a physical materiality, or because there has never been a physical materiality, as it is the case for digital-born texts. How will this change our sensation of materiality?
Sensing Digital Materiality
The last case study that Spadini introduced in her presentation was the digital edition project Pathfinders by Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar.[3] The goal of this project is stated in its subtitle: “Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature.” It displays “not just the works but also the platforms, programs, codes, and computers”.[4] In other words the material mediation of this early digital literature. The project attempts to do this by including tutorial videos and handbooks to demonstrate the usage these tools (platforms, programs, etc.).
The Pathfinders project is, to some extent, comparable with Farge’s Book Le Goût de l’Archive,in that both works document the experience of materiality. In Farge’s case, it’s through of the description of the work of a historian in the archive; in Moulthrop and Grigar’s case, it’s through documenting the experience of using digital literature. However, is this enough to show the potential and limits of materiality? To sense digital materiality? Maybe emulating or simulating the usage, rather than just flatly displaying or documenting the experience of it.
Farge’s book cannot replace the trip to the archive, and I would argue that it speaks the most to those who have already experienced archival work. Nevertheless, Farge gives us an idea of how sensing materiality feels like. Perhaps thinking about that could help us to find more creative digital solutions to include materiality in digital editing/ archiving projects.
[1] Farge,Arlette: «Vom Geschmack des Archivs», in: WerkstattGeschichte 5, 1993, p.13-15.
[2] Ibid. P.14.
[3] Moulthrop, Stuart and Grigar, Dene: Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature, Nouspace Publications, 2015. Online: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders/title-page?path=index (last access: 21.10.2024)
[4] Joseph Tabbi, “Foreword”, in: Moulthrop, Stuart and Grigar, Dene: Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing, The MIT Press, 2017
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
quirinpfister (6. November 2024). Materiality. Einblicke in die Digital Humanities. Abgerufen am 8. Dezember 2024 von https://doi.org/10.58079/12muj
4 Antworten auf „Materiality“
Thank you very much for your interesting blog-post.
One question that came to my mind was, if there is any sort of materiality in genuine non-material sources like oral history. Sure, there is no trail of paper and I am not arguing that the metadata of non-material sources leaves some sort of materiality behind. But since there are many objects whose “touch reality” is no longer given, couldn’t we argue that the difference between some material, -but lost- sources and immaterial sources is vanishing?
Herzlichen Dank für deinen spannenden Beitrag! Ich arbeite vor allem auf dem Gebiet der Alten Geschichte und bin entsprechend selten im Archiv. Sämtliche Texte sind digital zur Verfügung gestellt, Archetypen längst verloren. Die literarische Tradition der Antike erscheint entsprechen abstrakt und nur schwer fassbar.
Der materielle Zugang zur Antike geschieht für Althistoriker:innen deshalb häufig über Münzen oder Inschriften. Auch diese sind und werden digital abgebildet, jedoch wird durch die Arbeit mit diesen Originalen das von dir zitierte “touch reality” («Wirklichkeit zu Berühren») möglich. Die Arbeit mit den materiellen Überresten sorgt für einen “sense of understanding” (Vorlesung Claus Beisbart), der ansonsten nicht möglich wäre.
I found your article, based on Dr. Elena Spadini’s presentation, both engaging and thought-provoking because it offers a rich exploration of materiality in both scholarly editing and the broader field of digital humanities. Moreover, I think that your article effectively addresses the tension between the physical and digital realms, particularly the challenges posed by the shift from traditional archival work to the digitalization of sources, such as scanning documents, papers or historical works.
Building on these reflections, I’d like to focus on a central question that arises from both your article and Spadini’s work: Is materiality still relevant in today’s digital age, perceived as “the age of media consciousness”? and if so, how has it changed the way we engage with texts? While digitization has made historical sources more accessible, enabling broader education and knowledge sharing; I’m of the opinion that it often overlooks the physical and sensory dimensions of these texts. In my view, materiality remains crucial because we should know in which forms things originated in the past, in order to be aware of how/what they are today. Thus, knowing the physical origins of a text provides the historical context that can shape, in turn, our current interpretation of a work and without it, we risk losing important information. For example, the unique details of a medieval manuscript, such as its handmade decorations, offer insights that a digital version alone cannot convey. Consequently, understanding where the text comes from is important to correctly interpret it, as materiality is one of the features of a text that can provide important information.
That said, a paradox, which has to be mentioned, arises: in many educational settings, students (as it happened to me while I was at high school) engage with historical texts only through digital reproductions without ever seeing them in person; despite spending so much time reading, studying and interpreting them. This raises the following question: How can we preserve the importance of materiality in an increasingly digital world? As texts become predominantly digital, we need to rethink how materiality is represented and included. Historians and scholars are understandably grappling with this transition, as we move towards finding ways to make materiality meaningful in digital formats.
In conclusion, I believe these reflections underscore the need to integrate materiality into the study of texts, not just as a visible feature but as a meaningful aspect of interpretation.
… good job 🙂 I really liked your article!
Was passiert, wenn wir Materialität wegwerfen, nachdem wir sie digitalisiert haben? Es ist aus deinem Beitrag offensichtlich geworden, dass das Wegwerfen von Materialität eine Begrenzung der Möglichkeiten darstellt. Aber passiert das nicht in Editionen und wie kann man Materialität ins Digitale übersetzen (es wird nie das gleiche sein), was passiert wenn man die Digitalen Produkte verliert? Auch wir Menschen nehmen Materialität “nur” mit unseren Sinnen war, was ist mit UV? Radiologie? etc. Viele Fragen sind offen, aber wir befinden uns auf einem guten Weg, den du charakterisiert hast