The Virtual Representation of the Past

Citation

Sanderson, K. (2009), "The Virtual Representation of the Past", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 742-743. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470910979723

The Virtual Representation of the Past brings together papers given by archaeologists and historians at The Expert Seminar which was held in Sheffield in April 2006. Each author explores a specific instance of working digitally. They describe the opportunities and limitations of working with digitised images of physical objects, the semantic challenges which need to be addressed when software applications are used to harvest meaning from textual sources, and the philosophical problems which arise from attempting to reconstruct the past through the use of digital visualisation technologies.

The book is organised around four themes: the virtual representation of text, the use of digital technology to find and evaluate data, the virtual representation of space and time and the virtual representation of objects and events. Each chapter is fascinating in its own right. Meg Twycross, for example, discusses some of the implications for research which arise from the widespread practice of making only low resolution grey‐scale images available in library and archive web sites. Such images reveal little about a document beyond its most superficial textual content. Through a detailed account of her own use of digital forensics Twycross shows how high resolution colour images produced under a variety of different lighting conditions can reveal layers of past content no longer visible to the naked eye. Even more intriguing, is the way in which the eye can see content in a high resolution digital surrogate which it somehow skips over without registering when reading the original analogue document.

A unifying theme running through the book is the dichotomy between research that is object specific and research which depends upon the development of ontologies that generalise data for specific purposes. Many of the chapter writers engage in subtle exploration of what is lost and what is gained when information is removed from its unique material context so that it can be generalised and classified into a new virtual context. The questions raised in exploring this dichotomy should be of great interest to archivists and librarians who use descriptive metadata to create virtual representations of the documents in their care. Information professionals often practise their craft as though they are neutral intermediaries in the business of collecting, preserving, and communicating information. Despite a growing body of post‐modern theory which draws attention to the ways in which libraries and archives create their own representations of an ultimately unknowable past, practice in general has not responded to the challenges implicit in that theory. This is where the chief value of The Virtual Representation of the Past lies. It is more than just a fascinating read about how historians and archaeologists are beginning to use digital technologies. It asks subtle questions about what happens to the past when it is represented digitally, about how digital technology can be used to reveal the layers of interpretation which have accumulated around surviving traces of past activity, and at the same time how it adds new layers of meaning which somehow must also be recognised and revealed. In his introduction Mark Greengrass describes this book as a “comparative exercise in representation.” Librarians and archivists might well compare their own practices and values with those described here and think about the ways in which they are also creating virtual representations of the past.