Investigations of a Dog

Bill Turkel has been testing a really cool piece of equipment. The MDX-20 can turn 3D computer models into physical objects, and can automatically scan physical objects to make 3D computer models of them. And it doesn’t rely on magic, alchemy, or the Dark Side of the Force. There are so many interesting things that could be done with this (not all of them related to SL avs, Weird Science, and “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”…). As Bill says, “the possibilities seem nearly endless”. Strangely, the first thing that came into my mind when I read about it was palaeontology. Maybe if this technology gets good enough it might be possible to digitize collections of fossils, then researchers could easily run off life size replicas instead of flying to China to measure dinosaur bones (but there might be drawbacks that I haven’t thought of because I don’t know enough about dinosaur measuring). As the David Baird quotes in Bill’s post make clear, objects created by the MDX-20 are models, not recreations of the thing itself how it really is. Just like theroetical models and digital resources, what we get is some aspects of the thing (usually the ones we’re most interested in) but not all of them.

Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out that while digital collections like EEBO give us easier access to some aspects of early modern texts, there are other aspects that we don’t get to experience unless we go back to the originals. “Reading them on a screen today is inevitably a different experience to reading actual copies.” Like Nick, I’m not sure what impact this has or is going to have on how we read these texts. Even with the original physical books in our hands we’re still a very long way from being able to reconstruct the meanings that readers found in them in the 17th century. Holding a book, feeling the paper, seeing the colour of the ink, will necessarily suggest more or different meanings to me than when I see a PDF on screen, but those are still my perceived meanings, and not necessarily anyone else’s. On the other hand, being able to see a physical difference between two books which isn’t apparent on EEBO gives a new insight and has to affect the range of possible meanings, even if we’re not sure exactly how.

This isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the 1930s tended to have the most important stories in the middle, not on the front page. I had absolutely no idea that this was the case. It’s not something that’s obvious if you’re just dipping into the Times Digital Archive as you just get one page out of context.

And it doesn’t just apply to print. The same issues come up with old computer games. I can play my old favourite C64 games on my PC using an emulator, but the experience isn’t the same as playing them on a real C64 in the 80s. In many ways it’s better - you don’t have to wait for tapes to load, there aren’t as many crashes - but from a historian’s point of view it’s obviously not a perfect way of reconstructing the past.