For scholars of the ancient world, which has been dissected for centuries, the presence of the digital in this field is yet a short, albeit well-explored, incursion. Studies involving the digital therefore must adopt a conceptual framework that looks beyond the simple claims to innovation that use of new and not so new technologies have been able to ride for decades. The editors of this volume have taken this challenge seriously. They explain that the work’s overall premise is the relationship between the material and the immaterial aspects of heritage; and it is through this dialogue that the collected chapters consider the impact of the digital on how cultural heritage is disseminated and interpreted.
Numerous projects and publications have previously addressed examples of digital approaches in cultural heritage settings. Digital projects on the Greek and Roman worlds have a decades-long history, with examples such as Rome Reborn first launching in 1996. The digitisation of ancient Greek and Latin texts through initiatives such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the work of the Packard Humanities Institute are even older. In addition, sets of guidelines about cultural heritage and the digital more broadly have been created by different stakeholders over the years, including the London Charter for the Computer-based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage, the Principles of Seville on virtual archaeology and the ReACH declaration on reproduction. These speak to some of the concerns raised by heritage professionals and others, some of which are represented in this volume through discussions on ideas of authenticity, community engagement and accessibility.
There has already been interest in ‘materiality’, as in this volume’s title, and how it relates to cultural heritage and the digital. Works have explored digital artefacts and embodied experiences, how notions of materiality can play out on digital platforms, digitised heritage made material again via 3D printing, and the materiality of the hardware that makes digital heritage possible. Materiality as a unifying theme for research on the intersection of digital and cultural heritage was explored directly in the ‘Digital (and) Materiality in Museums’ issue of Museum & Society in 2021. This issue featured articles on topics such as actor network theory and digital cataloguing of objects’ materiality, blockchain technology and digital museum objects, and authenticity and VR, among others, many of which find connections with the chapters presented here.
The volume’s authors explore cultural materials created in different time periods, and coming from and housed in many locations around the world. The breadth of this geographical and chronological scope means that readers have access to the ideas and concerns of a variety of different contexts that they might otherwise not come across. Such variety in a single volume also provides a good basis for discovering synergies as well as for making the peculiarity of any individual situation or project sharper. Students and scholars of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds will find a number of chapters devoted to related materials and many thematic links within others. The volume will be especially useful for those working on digitisation projects as many of the authors provide details on specific processes within these settings.
Of special interest to historians, several chapters at different points historicise the digital in a longer timeline of interactions with cultural heritage and its reception and visualisation. Palladino, in a chapter on spatial knowledge systems, offers a short history of how landscapes were conceptualised, with references as far-ranging as Greek periploi, Roman milestones, Chinese cosmography, Mixtec mythology and the Australian Indigenous tradition of Songlines (pp. 146–50). The rest of the chapter explores Linked Open Data infrastructures in several projects and demonstrates the difficulties of digitally representing and modelling different knowledge systems where ideas about space, culture, myth and other parameters may overlap or disagree. Likewise on the theme of historicising the digital, R. Lucarelli, in a chapter on virtual reality and decolonising ancient Egyptian collections, cites the tomb and temple models and reproductions of daily activities that have been found in funerary contexts as the ancient predecessors to contemporary digital modelling efforts (p. 167). Especially interesting is Lucarelli’s framing of the reception of these modern methods of reconstruction as ‘digital Egyptomania’ which, like its analogue historical counterpart, turns ancient Egypt into something ‘timeless’, ‘hyperreal’ and ‘unhistorical’ (p. 172). Also touching on the history of visualisation and how it affects modern ideas and processes, V. Vitale explores how the unreliability of the drawings and paintings of Pompeii created in the last few centuries affected her digital versions of the Temple of Isis and the House of Orpheus. She argues for what she terms ‘informed making’, an undertaking which means a deep engagement with the historical context of the evidence used to create any digital visualisation by the maker and an acknowledgement that any such visualisation is a palimpsest of past interpretations. This notion of ‘informed making’ could be extended to a number of other chapters in this volume, manifested in different ways.
Another theme prevalent throughout the volume is the digitisation of texts and objects and the relationship between the two. Examples include M. Filosa, U. Gad and Bodard’s chapter on the digitisation of papyri. Among a long list of recommendations, they argue that written descriptions of items for which photos are available are important acts of interpretation (pp. 55–6), and they promote the inclusion of information about the creation of digital editions within the metadata (p. 60). D. Elagina, on the other hand, in a chapter on Ethiopic manuscript culture, explores the complexity of physical and written materials that these objects can contain, including navigational aids such as tables of contents and ribbon or thread bookmarks. Elagina promotes a method of digitising these that can ‘serve as witness to the way a codex was used’ (p. 108). Writing on the digitisation of Sanskrit inscriptions, F. Bianchini comments on how a digital platform can not only provide information on things such as bindings and marginalia but also create unexpected connections between entries through hyperlinks (p. 81). With past antiquarian efforts sometimes severing the link between text and object, as demonstrated, for example, in J. Trimble’s study of ancient Roman collars made for enslaved people (‘The Zoninus Collar and the Archaeology of Roman Slavery’, AJA 120 [2016]), it is imperative that contemporary digitising efforts that turn ancient objects into images or 3D models ensure that these connections not only remain intact but also take advantage of the opportunities provided by them being reforged within different digital platforms and interfaces.
The place of images in both original materials and their digitised versions is picked up in several chapters. H. Baba’s chapter on Japanese woodcuts known as Mokkan details the history of the digitisation of these artefacts and highlights the important step when a function was added where users were able to search for characters using an image rather than text (p. 36). This has allowed for better searchability for characters difficult to decipher and avoids the ‘suppression’ of details such as stroke styles, which often occurs when characters are represented in Unicode (p. 39). In a chapter on sixteenth-century indigenous materials from Central Mexico, H. Woodward, J.A. Offner and C.W. Blackwell address similar ideas with reference to ‘non-alphabetic manuscripts’. They explain some of the different ways in which such materials have appeared in digital contexts in the past, such as within interfaces that are either clickable or use mouse-over features (pp. 130–2).
Some chapters promote agency for communities when their cultural heritage materials are digitised and address the challenges of making different types of knowledge available on digital platforms. These include C. Okorie’s work on copyright, and P.L. Granados García and C. Ashley’s chapter on the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, which has projects around the world. They explain that it is important to support different ‘archiving practices’ and methods of ‘knowledge preservation’, but warn that a digital repository can lose ‘coherence, manageability, and resilience’ without a ‘robust metadata schema’ (pp. 193–4). With examples from across different contexts, R. Kahn and R. Simon explore human remains in digital settings since, they argue, there are no broadly accepted guidelines for how this type of material is presented. This chapter perhaps ought to have come with a short warning as it features a photograph of a fragment of human skin, tattoo in tow, from the Science Museum in London (p. 219) in both the printed and the digital editions of the volume. It strikes as an example of the ‘sensitive data’ that the chapter otherwise explores thoroughly.
Many of these and other themes overlap across more of the chapters than I have had room to present. This speaks to a rich collection of projects and ideas potentially useful on their own and as a group for those interested in digital approaches to cultural heritage. The ‘materiality’ of the book’s title is perhaps a little too broadly defined to be truly useful, as chapters rarely concentrate on materiality rather than material, and the relationship of the digital to that materiality could be explored in more depth. This, however, only means that there is room for future work on the topic, and this volume can join others as a good starting point for further discussion.
The book is well presented, with colour images even in the printed version, which are a great addition. The editors should be commended for involving a range of authors with different specialities and, both the editors and authors, for providing abstracts in so many different languages. Though the main text is in English, different chapters are summarised in Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Nahuatl and others. The bibliographies also cast the net much wider than Anglophone scholarship, which is a welcome practice in a field that is so international.
