Though digitization can play a very important role in helping to preserve records and disseminate them more widely with various audiences (Terras 2012,, 1-3; Terras 2022, 257), it also has real limitations of which to be aware. Beyond the macro-level consideration that only a small fraction of physical records will realistically be digitized in the near future (given financial, logistical, and political considerations of holding institutions and their funders; Terras 2012, 3-4; Terras 2022, 257), there are also limitations inherent in the digitization process itself.
To put it simply, a digital facsimile will never be a perfect copy of any physical item. The degree to which it diverges, however, will depend greatly upon the nature of the original item or record. For written records like documents, digitization can actually capture a great deal of the content of that record. (That is, assuming the digitization is done with care – poor lighting, bad focus, or lossy compression can greatly reduce the legibility of a scanned document). The same is largely true of digital copies of flat artworks like posters, flyers, or even paintings, assuming that the hardware used to make the digitization is of sufficiently high-quality to capture the nuances of coloring and shading. Even here, however, a high-quality digitization will never be able to fully or even adequately capture the tactile qualities of a basic document, much less an artwork that may have subtle bumps or scratches. Nor can it give a real sense of the relative size of a document or piece of art; one looking at a digital copy of Picasso’s Guernica on a standard computer screen, for example, would hardly know that the original painting takes up nearly an entire wall in a museum. And of course, digital scans can only capture one side of a flat object at a time, though housing scans of each side together in the same location can mitigate this limitation.
The divergence from the original source material becomes even more dramatic as we move from flat items to those in three dimensions. Two-dimensional photographs of three-dimensional objects, no matter how high their quality, may do an adequate job of some of an object’s visual quality never be able to give a complete sense of an object’s shape or how it feels to the touch. Three-dimensional scans can render physical objects as manipulable digital objects, allowing users to view all sides of an object as though they were examining it in-person, though the quality of the scan depends greatly upon the sophistication of the equipment (including software) as well as the individual skill of the scanner. But even the most skilled 3-D scanning technician will be unable to render any sounds that an object might make, much less recreate the interactive element of objects that are meant to be used rather than just seen.
These limits of digital imaging became evident during the kitchen exercise that we performed in this module. Even digitizing my family’s simple shopping list proved less straightforward than I had initially assumed, once I realized from doing the exercise that the feeling, weight, size, and back side of the list would impossible to capture. Perhaps feeling and weight are not such crucial elements when one is dealing simply with documents, but the limits of digitization were brought home quickly when I moved on to three-dimensional objects.
Working with digitized representations can have a significant impact how we understand different kinds of items. Digitization can have a flattening effect in the sense of increasing the sense of likeness between resources that have been stripped of many of their physical qualities such as size and function. Given the relatively small number of resources that have been digitized, an outsized focus on digitized items may artificially inflate their importance relative to non-digitized resources and/or obscure the significance of those items (and the narratives they convey) that have not been digitized. Digital objects tend to be de-contextualized, in the sense that they are discoverable via searches that remove them from their archival context and thus render their relationship to other records more obscure.
At the same time, digitization also has many advantage for our ability to use resources for different purposes. The availability of digital records online allows researchers and the general public much easier access to records they would otherwise have to travel long distances to consult. Digitalization also facilitates the creation of large data sets that can be used for various research initiatives such as statistical modeling and text mining. 3-D visualizations allow for access to artifacts or sites that may be restricted or inaccessible due to preservation concerns, as well as for the virtual reconstruction of damaged or degraded artifacts (Drucker 2021, 163-166).
Bibliography
Drucker, Joanna. “Photogrammetry.” In The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship, 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2021, 162-168.
Terras, Melissa. “Digitisation and Digital Resources in the Humanities.” In Digital Humanities in Practice, edited by Claire Warwick, Melissa Terras, and Julianne Nyhan. Facet Publishing, 2012.
—. “Digital humanities and Digitised Cultural Heritage.” In James O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 255-266.