We were left with two questions at the end of the last class: (1) Whether the experience of working with digital archival sources is “the same” as working directly with the real thing in archives. (2) Assuming that competence in the digital realm has attained for its adepts the status of members of a sort of sub-culture, what can these adepts contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning that ordinary mortals from the “analog community” cannot. (1b or 2b)There is another possibility in this question, namely, can people who are competent in creating effective digital means of expression give voice to groups of people, or to objects and “voices” from the past that can make them speak, and hence bring them to the awareness of others who lack this competence.
The alternative extension of the question may illuminate the link between the two. The purposes to which the digital medium is being put for teaching and learning history is: “to make areas of knowledge available to individuals and groups for whom they would not otherwise be known or accessible” It is certainly not The Same Thing to be Howard Carter peering for the first time into the tomb of Tutankhamun and to be standing in front of a glass case with the artifacts pulled out of that context, or seeing the grainy photo of the tomb room as he viewed it. However, we can clearly state that making the experience available to the public in various ways is advantageous to the state of knowledge, and the superficial or partial experience of the reality may lead to further, more intimate engagement. The bottom line: a person can’t know if they might be interested in knowing more of something if they know nothing. Taking an example from earlier forms of media: A great scholar might teach a circle of local students over a lifetime. A student might travel to sit at his feet for a period of time; the student might make notes and share them with others back home. The scholar might write a manuscript that gets copied; it might be printed in later centuries, or translated, or illustrated. We might go to the library to get a copy, or fly to the city where the manuscript is housed. Or we might be able to access a facimile of the MS online, or a digital transcription of the text. No one level, except for the death of the scholar and his followers, excludes the eventual possibility of further, more authentic and intimate engagement with the historical material–the scholar’s death OR lack of knowledge that it exists. In this way, it is possible to state that there is a positive value in making the source available, and compromising intimacy with it. The only negative criteria would be the deliberate or careless distortion of the source — missing pages, excised text or other manipulations of its authenticity and completeness. As long as the digital presentation is transparent, and prepared with integrity, and remains verifiable for the professional public, then there can be no downside to making it digitally available. However, Orwellian manipulations of the digital record, combined with rendering the original inaccessible, would make the process illegitimate and inauthentic. This could happen wholesale in an untransparent, unethical scholarly environment.
As to the second question and its corollary, the matter seems simple. Those individuals and institutions possessing the knowledge, skill, and technology to produce effective digital media may form a subculture or even an entire culture in a land beyond the digital divide. They may someday find the rest of humanity so boring that they launch themselves in a spaceship to colonize another planet. In the meantime, however, rather than spending their cultural capital in self-absorption, Digital Masters can contribute their skills to helping everyone else with knowledge and other forms of contribution to spread their wealth among the global public. This can extend from the lazy people living in technologically advanced societies who lean on Digital People, to those peoples of the earth who do not have access to the necessary technology, but who have valuable knowledge and culture to contribute to humankind and the environment, and must rely on Digital People to lower their wing of mercy to give them voice and expression. As in the previous answer, their professional obligation is to perform their artistic feat with integrity and empathy.