Magical and meaningful value of collections
The ultimate Google project is to turn all textual and numerical representations of the world – all books, manuscripts etc. – into searchable digital format. Great! But what is lost in the process? In a commentary in the 6 October issue of the TLS (“Such attics cleared of me: Saving writers’ manuscripts for the nation”, pp. 14-15), my old favourite poet Andrew Motion discusses my not-so-favourite poet Philip Larkin’s view on the collection of manuscripts.
“All manuscripts have two kinds of value”, says Larkin: “what might be called the magical value and the meaningful value”. Adds Motion: “I love Larkin’s distinction between the magical and the meaningful”. There is “a primitive, visceral thrill in thinking: ‘My god, Keats’s hand rested on this piece of paper’”.
Meaningful value has almost completely dominated historians’ valuation of collections. The neglect of the magical value has probably also underscored the (otherwise very useful) avalanche of projects for the digitalisation of collections.
Andrew Motion’s/Philip Larkin’s point about the magical value of collections is a reminder, however, of the fact – which everyone who has worked in an archive knows – that the physical remains add a dimension to the historian’s work which easily gets lost when one only has access to documents in html- or pdf-format.
18 Nov 2006 Thomas
Hi all,
Aspects of these discussions are hot, as Kajsa Hartig’s good presentation brought up last week at the Nordic visual studies conference A Closer Look. The issue - in part similar to what you discuss here - was how photographic collections should be acquired, administered and made available by e.g. museums: is it enough to have photographs digitized and accessible through a database? or should original prints/reprints be documented, kept, administrated, made available? what about negatives? for whom? how whould digitized versions be documented? what are researchers needs, and other interested professional groups’?
The discussions about the way museums, archives and library should work with photographs made highly visible the different uses and “values” of this material: some of the researchers argued that they would not have needed access to the artifactual photographs and negatives for the projects they were conducting, whereas others obviously have needed and used this artifactual dimension of their visual material.
There is certainly a magical value to material documents and pictures, but their artifactuality is also part of the ‘meaningful’ content of the sources for certain historians or projects.
To me, this points to the most difficult part of the issue: these different kinds of value are highly dependent on the possible uses of documents, pictures etc - and this use is pretty much dependent on who uses them.
On the other hand, the problem of ‘designing in’ uses in the creation of sources echoes with those encountered in other historical enterprises such as gathering/creating sources in contemporary history; and we know that some of these issues are if not solved, at least coped with.
Or is the parallel far-stretched?
//Isabelle.