:Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor

Abstract

Using a captivating blend of ethnographic narrative and medieval manuscript case studies, Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor pushes back against the twin dangers inherent in academic digitization processes. On the one hand, Whearty rejects any “techno-utopian” idea that digitization renders historical documents radically and universally accessible (32). On the other, Whearty also rejects the outright dismissal of digital texts by academics who scoff at their “disem-bodied” nature. Such scholars contend that digitized texts erase (or manipulate) the materiality of the “original” text and, in doing so, obscure the research apparatus that should contextualize the text (11-19). Whearty’s proverbial via media is found in embracing the history of digitization as a history worthy of its own analysis. Whearty similarly recognizes the digital codex as a material object in its own right, part of the ongoing reception history of medieval texts. Engaging the same methods scholars employ to analyze the contributors to medieval manuscripts, Whearty demonstrates the value of foregrounding the “labor and laborers” that produced digital texts (32). She has even created the “Caswell Test” to encourage authors to credit (and listen to!) archivists and librarians as a part of their work (17). Whearty’s intra-historical method thus highlights the enduring questions to consider when engaging texts, regardless of medium or era: Why and how was a text produced? What economic, emotional, and editorial factors contributed to the decisions made in producing this text? Digital Codicology peels back the layers of these questions, engaging the entirety of the digitization process in a variety of institutions. In many instances, Whearty draws on specifics from her time as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Manuscripts at Stanford University. Although she was trained as