This is the sixth post in a series. To start from the beginning, click here.
In the past five posts, I have outlined an archive of images and demonstrated how visual analysis of images such as these can foster strong close-reading practices among undergraduate and advanced high-school students. Now I would like to turn my attention to the import of the digital medium in which my students are consuming the images.
What is different about viewing these images online instead of on a projector in a classroom, in a museum, or in a rare-book room where one might find an older edition of Shakespeare containing, for example, engraved illustrations?
In the past five posts, I have outlined an archive of images and demonstrated how visual analysis of images such as these can foster strong close-reading practices among undergraduate and advanced high-school students. Now I would like to turn my attention to the import of the digital medium in which my students are consuming the images.
What is different about viewing these images online instead of on a projector in a classroom, in a museum, or in a rare-book room where one might find an older edition of Shakespeare containing, for example, engraved illustrations?
One of my students, reading a 13th c. hymnal at UCLA's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
For one, the digital images are democratized in a way that the physical paintings cannot be. I believe that this manifests in two ways. First, digitization allows for anyone with an Internet connection to view the images. Tufte, in her essay cited earlier in this series, taught at the University of Southern California and had easy access to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, which just so happens to have a copy of the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost. Not everyone will be so lucky as to have access to a rare edition of an illustrated text; and in my case, my students are scattered all over the globe, so it would not matter any way. Even if Stanford had one of these paintings in its collection, I would still need to take a photograph and send it digitally to my students. Digitization makes images moveable so that a far greater number of people can enjoy them, and it allows for the creation of new viewing communities that would otherwise never exist.
This brings me to a second effect of the democratization of images: whereas a painting or an illustration in a rare book can be fetishized to a certain extent, the proliferation of images through digital media makes an image more intellectually accessible for younger students. Anxiety about speaking about an image just isn’t as great when we diminish the magical qualities frequently associated with curated and archived objects and images. Rather than looking at an image in a museum or a library, students are consuming the image in their own spaces.
This brings me to a second effect of the democratization of images: whereas a painting or an illustration in a rare book can be fetishized to a certain extent, the proliferation of images through digital media makes an image more intellectually accessible for younger students. Anxiety about speaking about an image just isn’t as great when we diminish the magical qualities frequently associated with curated and archived objects and images. Rather than looking at an image in a museum or a library, students are consuming the image in their own spaces.
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