. Rachel Dressler . Frank Hauser . David Wills

Rachel Dressler Assistant Professor of Art

“Digital technology has expanded the visual database of my art students enormously, but there are drawbacks, too.”

A twelfth-century castle and a twenty-first-century computer: what could be further apart? Yet, in the digital age, these two technological marvels of their day unite at our fingertips. In 2001, medievalists like myself, and my students, can surf innumerable web sites, viewing spectacular color images of castles and cathedrals, sculptures and manuscript paintings; the legacy of a remote age whose originals most of us will never see. Not only can we study pictures, we can download informative texts, studying these extraordinary works in the comfort of our homes and offices.

For art-historical researchers, digital technologies have meant access: access to collections through such web sites as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art; access to research databases such as the “Bibliography of the History of Art,” and access to each other through e-mail and scholarly list serves. The pace of scholarship has accelerated astonishingly. It is now virtually impossible to stay up-to-date with the latest journal articles and books, and the growing phenomenon of electronic journals devoted to medieval studies such as The Medieval Review or Speculum, to name just two, has multiplied both the pleasures and pains of research.

My own study of English knightly tomb figures is a case in point. I discovered many of my most important resources by searching the online catalogs of the University at Albany libraries, the Columbia University libraries, and the New York Public Library. What was unavailable to me in Albany I ordered from Interlibrary Loan electronically. Such convenience was unknown twelve years ago when I was writing my dissertation at Columbia.

Through digital technology, my students tour sites we have discussed in class. For each of my courses I have constructed a web site that features links to relevant works, and I have assigned my students to find other such resources and post them for the rest of the class. I can even connect to the web during my lectures, affording my students images not available otherwise. All of these capabilities expand my students’ visual database enormously.

But there are drawbacks to our growing reliance on digital technology. One is the lack of editing on the web. Not being experts in the field of medieval art history, my students are sometimes unable to distinguish between accuracy and error. And a technology is only as good as the hardware that supports it. If one’s computer is less powerful, one’s monitor of lesser resolution, or one’s classroom ill-equipped, all the available web imagery and on-line information in the world will do little good. I have seen few digital images that equal the standard of the highest-quality photographs and slides, neither of which is as dependent on hardware.

As a child I fell in love with libraries; it is probably a major reason I became an academic. I still love to spend hours in the stacks. Not infrequently, as I hunt for one particular book or article, I find other fascinating and useful resources right next to it. And there is nothing to match the sensual experience of turning the weighty pages of a beautiful book to discover magnificent and previously unknown works within. I would be sad indeed to think that succeeding generations would never know such splendid serendipity.

Rachel Dressler, an assistant professor in the Department of Art, has published articles on English medieval tomb sculpture and issues of class and gender.

. Rachel Dressler . Frank Hauser . David Wills

Frank Hauser Assistant Professor of Art

“Print is not going to go away in chemistry.”

I’m all for the digital revolution, but it has its limits for scientists like myself, who specialize in synthetic organic chemistry. I’m constantly in the library, digging through the stacks and looking up things in old journals. I can go back 60 or 100 years and track the chemical literature of a molecule from the first time it was made up to the present. That depth is just not available on the World Wide Web.

Given the economics of digitizing information, it’s unlikely that older chemistry journals will ever be rendered into digital form. But that’s okay. I like to hold a journal in my hands, to put it down on the table at home, to write with one hand while I’m reading and trying to figure out what they did. Reading from a computer screen is not that convenient. Most of my students and colleagues still do their most creative work with paper, a pencil and running experiments in the lab. Print is not going to go away in chemistry. I should note, however, that a really powerful use of computers and the Internet, which expedites our work, is the ability to search the current chemical literature.

Frank Hauser, a professor in the Chemistry Department, is internationally recognized for his development of new synthetic methods and strategies for natural products synthesis.

. Rachel Dressler . Frank Hauser . David Wills

David Wills Professor of Languages, Literatures & Cultures

“In the age of the Internet, the trend in reading habits seems to be towards an increased passivity . . .”

The e-book is here. There is no escaping it. And who knows, we may learn to love it. The codex was a vast improvement over the scroll, the paperback over the quarto. The e-book will be adopted as soon as it is perceived to be an improvement over the book as we know it. That is the simple and ineluctable logic of technological advance.

The technology of the book, however, does not begin with the e-book. Writing is itself one of the oldest technologies. There is therefore little sense in defending a certain form of the book. Moreover, the book needs no defending; it is itself a form of defense. Conceived of as an archive, a veritable arsenal or armory, it is a repository of information that, whatever its form, functions as an institutionalized enclave, of culture, of knowledge, of truth. The promise — and, for some, the nightmare — of the World Wide Web, is that it will become the universal book, the “Anti-Book” that is still more than ever a book, an infinitely varied and diverse network that nevertheless functions as a monolithic centralizing institution through which all knowledge must pass.

Debate about the book needs to concentrate less on the book itself and more on matters of reading. This is where the culture wars really begin. In the age of the Internet, the trend in reading habits seems to be towards an increased passivity, towards the presumption that reading, and writing, should function in the service of a supposed transparency of information; that reading is simply a means of access to the informational archive.

Not!

If the book is a form of defense, we should bear in mind that the best method of defense is attack. The most important books fight back; they resist appropriation by reading. They exist on the borders of illegibility. That is why we read them again and again, because they don’t allow us to get everything the first time around. If the current technological revolution can render the book more dangerous, or hot to handle, it will have made some advance. Otherwise, it will simply be less of the same.

David Wills is chairman of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and was co-organizer of last October’s BOOK/ENDS conference.