Introduction and Background

During a visit to the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell, our class sat before a wide variety of codices. Gazing upon the bindings of these books, we could only guess at the innards. Due to our location in the Rare and Manuscript Collections, we could probably make an educated guess about what kinds of things we were looking at, but several of the objects before us would not appear out of place several stories above us in the library stacks among thousands of other books.

The printed book and the manuscript are very similar objects, and without close inspection items from one category can be easily mistaken for items in another. Both generally consist of some sort of paper or parchment grouped and bound together between two boards, which open up to reveal leaves coated in ink. Though much of the immediate form and function of these two groups are the same, manuscripts are segregated from printed books for more complicated reasons than age and rarity.

Because of these superficial similarities, it is perhaps natural to think of one in terms of the other. Stephen Nichols argues that doing so obscures the realities of manuscript cultures, that "we've been conditioned to think of [manuscripts] not for what they actually are, but rather as archaic precursors of printed books"¹, fraught with errors and changes obscuring the author's intent. Thinking of manuscripts as "book-like" in terms of the printed books so common in our lives "is to define the medieval codex retroactively from the perspective of mechanical printing. And that's pretty much how modernism has defined written artifacts of the Middle Ages"². Though when we open these artifacts and see handwritten instead of machine-set text, the printed book and the manuscript are different "In almost every way imaginable"³.

In a video discussing the work done on the Archimedes Palimpsest, Reviel Netz describes the form of the edition of the work he was in the process of producing:

"We shall share with the world all the raw data, we shall give the world in an electronic form simply because the data is immense in magnitude

This data will have to be disseminated in electronic form, we shall give in electronic form all the information that came out of this project, in a sort of a multidimensional, really, set of data⁴

At the website housing the Archimedes Palimpsest data⁵, one can browse through a massive collection of files that represent the work of Netz and others. This contains many images of the pages of the palimpsest taken under various conditions, a vast array of information about these images (including camera, lighting, any processing done to the images, date taken, and what page of the manuscript this is of), and plenty of documents which describe the structure of the data so that it may be more broadly comprehensible to some viewer.

At the beginning of this short speech, Netz holds a book containing an earlier edition of some of the same Archimedes, the very work he hopes to replace. This is a massive remediation, taking a small physical book to a massive collection of images, texts, and data hosted on the Internet. But what is the effect of the remediation? What does taking the contents of this manuscript out from between the bindings holding the manuscript together and transforming them to a necessarily-digital form? Can digital objects serve as proper surrogates for manuscripts? How does it make sense to tie manuscripts to digital artifacts?