Digitization is an important topic for professionals in the digital humanities community. DH work includes engagement with digitized historical records, artifacts, and images as well as corpora and other machine processible datasets created from historical sources (Terras 2012). One of the benefits of understanding the digitization process and environment is a better grasp of the capabilities and drawback of digital representations. While online collections are of great benefit for research, teaching, and engagement, it is important to understand that working with digital proxies of documents and material culture can be fundamentally different than working with concrete, physical items. It can change how we perceive the items and what we are able to do with them.
When an item is digitized, some things are captured and some are not. Even with the most advanced technology, digital representations cannot communicate to the senses what cannot be captured (e.g., I cannot currently digitize the smell of an old book). In my experience photographing and scanning items, paper documents are by far easier to work with. Two-dimensional scans are far less expensive and time consuming than more advanced technologies (Terras 2022). Text is obviously captured by the scan, and sometimes folds or textures of paper can be seen as well. If a document is colored, it is difficult to distinguish whether the color on the screen is a true representation of the physical version. Other than the obvious smell and sound associated with paper documents, contextual clues about the care of the document and position within the collection are difficult to include in the capture and can only be described in associated metadata.
Some items are not easily captured or require more advanced 3D imaging techniques for a more accurate representation. Photos or two-dimensional scans of three-dimensional objects are insufficient in many ways: all sides of an object are not visible, textures look flat, and a lack of context for understanding size and scale. Technologies such as photogrammetry can create a 3D rendering based off many overlapping photos taken from different angles that are stitched together (Drucker 2021). I used a free app called Kiri Engine, which is available for iPhone and Android. I discovered that it took some practice and that lighting and being patient about taking enough overlapping photos was crucial for good results. I found that these 3D scans gave a better representation of objects and artifacts dimensions, angles, and textures and allowed the object to be rotated and inspected from all angles. Some things that were still hard to capture were the weight of an item and size to some extent. Smell and sound and feel, of course, are also not captured with this technology. The processing was slow and took several minutes for each item, so that’s one consideration when applying the use of the technology to a large project.
Engaging with documents online is different from pulling physical papers out of an archival box. When I smell and touch a box of old papers, different questions are raised in my mind beyond the text I see on the pages. I think about where the documents were kept, how they were preserved, and I think about provenance. Those questions don’t surface as naturally with digitized documents. However, one of the benefits of digitizing text documents is the ability to use technologies like OCR (optical character recognition) to make text easier to read, process, search, index, and create data sets. The technology is not perfect; bad lighting, colored paper, or unusual formatting could affect the output. I found that my phone can quickly transform any text from a photo into plain text that I can use elsewhere. In my testing of this technology, I found that my sample worked well, but I would not trust it to do large sets of text for a project without quality assurance checks.
The constraints of a digital screen determine how we can interact with an item. Even a photo or scan of a document or photo could look slightly different on two different screens depending on color settings, so accuracy of representation is not even entirely controllable. I can see an item, but I can’t touch it. Maybe the weight might be something worthy of analysis on an archaeological artifact, but I wouldn’t even think to address that in my study because I didn’t experience that characteristic of the item in my digital interaction.
Digital tools on the other hand afford new opportunities for study and preservation. For instance, Joanna Drucker discusses several use cases in which technologies allow for study or preservation of items without unearthing them or displaying fragile items without exposing them to human touch. Digitization can prevent fragile documents from being handled repeatedly. Digitization also allows for the display of multiple interpretations of restoration for an artifact without altering the appearance of the actual item (Drucker 2021).
In addition to understanding what digitization can and cannot do and how it affects DH projects, it’s a good idea to be aware that there are digitization standards as well as cost and sustainability concerns for institutions regarding digitization projects. Understanding the digitization process helps DH professionals to contribute to the conversation on what to digitize in the future that will do the greatest good.
References
Drucker, Joanna. “Photogrammetry.” In The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship, 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2021, 162-168.
Terras, Melissa. “Digitisation and Digital Resources in the Humanities,” In Digital Humanities in Practice, edited by Claire Warwick, Melissa Terras, and Julianne Nyhan. Facet Publishing, 2012.
Terras, Melissa. “Digital humanities and Digitised Cultural Heritage.” In James O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 255-266.