Digital technologies make ancient manuscripts more accessible, but there are risks and losses too
Digitising manuscripts may promise preservation and accessibility, but it does not future-proof our access to the past.
Near the end of the 18th century, a Greek monk named Nikodemos was putting together a massive anthology of Byzantine texts on prayer and spirituality, which he would call The Philokalia.
He lamented the state of learning among his fellow monks, because they did not have access to the texts of their tradition:
Because of their great antiquity and their scarcity – not to mention the fact that they have never yet been printed – they have all but vanished. And even if some few have somehow survived, they are moth-eaten and in a state of decay, and remembered about as well as if they had never existed.
Nikodemos hoped to correct this by collecting and printing texts that would otherwise fall to dust. By making the manuscripts into a book, he would preserve the knowledge they contained – but not the manuscript, not the artefact itself.
He does not mention how difficult his Byzantine manuscripts were to read and transcribe, even for someone familiar with the language. Copying by hand takes dozens, even hundreds of hours of intensive labour. Reading them means learning to decode scribes’ handwriting, abbreviations and shorthand.
Every manuscript, with its errors, notes and doodles – not to mention its artistry, images, and ornamentation – remains a...
