Digitally Remediating the Material Archive
To create digital versions of physical materials is to participate in what Jeffrey Schnapp has characterized as “knowledge design.”[2] By this, Schnapp evokes the ways that knowledge production is inevitably and irrevocably imbricated in the genres, forms, and mechanisms that contribute to its creation. For a project like this, “knowledge design” conveys how digitization encompasses metadata structures, coding skills, website architecture, and graphic design, all of which are practiced from the perspective of a humanities-based discipline. Far from being purely a purely technical exercise, digital remediation has become an integral part of my scholarly process as a Victorianist and media archaeologist. As a process, digital remediation not only reshaped my research questions, but it also informed the strategies that I used to represent the lantern’s history in a digital medium. Transitioning from a document-based dissertation to a web-based one revealed the ways in which writing for a digital medium required thinking in architectural as well as textual terms. I tend to describe my writing process as “building,” “crafting,” or “designing” because web pages are more than their prose content. The visual layout and navigational features of a page function as pieces of visual rhetoric that advance the scholarly argument offered by the prose.
In this way, the dissertation’s scholarly contribution to studies of nineteenth-century visual media, particularly as part of the global history of the missionary movement, is inseparable from its digital form. Like the magic lantern show, the dissertation relies on apparti to create a narrative in a multisensory medium. By reflecting on the affordances of these technologies, I advocate for digital forms of scholarship as a means to critically engage with the screen’s implication in Britain’s colonial past. The dissertation critiques the limitations of analog and digital technologies through which to study the lantern show’s local context. As with any representation of one medium in another, aspects of the lantern show as a multisensory and interactive performance medium are inevitably and irrevocably lost when translated into another medium. At the same time, the dissertation’s web-based form opens up a screen-based space in which these materials can be reunited, creating a reading experience that parallels the embodied sensations of experiencing a magic lantern show. This visually-oriented and interactive form of presentation enables me to place missionaries’ magic lantern shows within their local cultural contexts, thereby foregrounding the non-European perspectives that have been previously underrepresented in studies of the lantern’s global history. In doing so, the dissertation joins projects like Livingstone Online in its efforts to promote more equitable and more diverse representation in digital collections of nineteenth-century material.
[1] Although materiality evokes a sense of physicality, Apparduai’s uses this term more expansively to encompass perceivable, but ultimately ephemeral expressions of mediation like speeches. I discuss his conception of these terms at length in “Media Archaeology.”
[2] “Knowledge Design,” Keynote Lecture for (Digital) Humanities Revisited – Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age, December 5 – 7, 2013, remediates as a PDF by VolkswagenStiftung as part of the Herrenhausen Lectures series, accessible through jeffresnap.com.