I have been studying history for many years and often I find myself confronted with a question that every humanities student has been confronted with at least once in their life, in one variation or the other. It is the inevitable - What's it good for? It is a simple enough question to which the either clueless or devious questioner may expect an equally simple answer. Of course, the issue is much more complex than the simplicity of the question may suggest to an unsuspecting interlocutor. Since it touches upon multi-layered and somewhat philosophical justifications of a whole academic field, a layman may be immediately at loss with a reasonable answer that lives up to the actual complexity of the question. The questioner then struggles to come up with something short and concise and usually fails.
That, and, well, maybe the questioners do not know themselves really. Maybe they never really thought about it or they don’t care. Maybe their subject is just something they like, even love and then never thought much about further. Just like some people like spinach and eat it all the time, the question “What's spinach good for?” just never occurs to them, other than that they like it, even though they may well think of some form of "The iron and the calcium are quite healthy!" if someone keeps pestering them.
What is the study of history good for? What is the study of book history good for? What are the practical applications of these fields? What can they teach us? Cicero famously once said, historia magistra vitae est (History is life’ teacher). That certainly makes sense to a history student or enthusiast but your Average Joe might not be satisfied with that explanation when the trigger for the question was the practical use of, say, Organisational structures of mercenary companies in fifteenth century Hesse. Or it may not be immediately clear to Joe (or Jane) why Possibilities of political participation in Greek poleis of the pre-classical period should be relevant for his struggle to find a job or a spouse. And maybe they are not.
So what do these after all not altogether deep considerations have to do with anything? Enter The British Library. It is the largest library in the world with about fourteen million books. One of its highlights is the Digitized Manuscripts section on its homepage and one of the biggest treasure troves for every book enthusiast out there. Among other things it contains large numbers of medieval texts, the most famous probably being the Harley Scripts:
The Harley Science Project, funded by William and Judith Bollinger, makes available images and descriptions of 150 medieval and modern scientific manuscripts from the British Library’s Harley collection. (...) They comprise texts relating to early scientific knowledge, such as astronomy, astrology, the computus, mathematics, physics, botany, medicine and veterinary science.
Wonderful! Every enthusiast thinks, and happily starts clicking his way through all these old manuscripts and illustrations. First of all he will notice that the site and the manuscripts themselves are easy to navigate. There is a search function for those who know what they are looking for, and a highlights section for those who don't. Every document is cataloged with date, title, information about language, a physical description of the text, its ownership and a little bibliography with relevant texts. Most importantly perhaps, as we are about to discover in a moment, is a short summary of the content of most of the pages and illustrations. When an enthusiast starts clicking their way through all these old texts, they will notice that navigation is exceedingly easy and fluid. One can freely zoom in and out of the high-resolution image to assess even the tiniest of little spots and stains and marks time may have left on the page. Information about the content is always readily available; the content can be easily accessed. The enthusiasts’ hearts may thus beat a little faster than it should while one skims through all these old pages and looks at them from all kinds of angles. Alas.
If other enthusiast is anything like me, they may end up rather sooner than later with a hollow feeling where his excitement has been just moments earlier. What's it good for? Or in this specific case: What the hell am I even looking at? Naturally, the content summary will give one some idea at least but that is hardly comparable to being able to read the text yourself. Reading, however, is out of the question for us mere mortals, encountering pages that may look like this:
Most of us won't be able to decipher the letters, read Medieval Latin or Old English fluently (if at all) or make sense of the images in the scripts. Unless one is a highly specialised expert, there is simply not much one could actually do with these scans other than appreciate them. And appreciating them we do, still. After a moment of being dumbfounded and feeling a sense of loss, like witnessing something really beautiful that we may always be excluded of, we continue clicking. We may not understand fully, but we may get a sense of the sheer weight of the compiled knowledge, of the beauty of the typeset, the brilliancy of the colours, the gravity of the historical document.
So when the British Library just recently announced that they had entered ten of their 15th century Almanacs on their Digitized Manuscripts site, I rejoiced, even though I knew I would never be able to actually use them for anything, to find any practical application, hell, I wouldn’t even be able to read them. Yet I clicked my way through almost all of them. Had someone found me thus, slowly clicking my way through these scripts while sipping a cup of coffee, turning a page around here, zooming in there, he may have asked What's it good for? Well, frankly, I don't know. I do know that what I look at is somehow important. And that it is also beautiful, even though, for me, it is the beauty of the useless.
What do we accomplish in making these texts available at anyone with an Internet connection when the vast majority cannot access the textual content?
Does the inability of most people to read and understand the content of these texts lessen the importance of a digitized archive?
Does this type of archive make sense for these types of texts? What sort of texts does this sort of archive make sense for, if not 15th century almanacs and Medieval texts?
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