Chapter 14 - Coda: Concluding Thoughts on Digital Surrogates

Summary

ON THE NIGHT of September 2, 2018, the National Museum of Brazil was destroyed by a tragic fire. Wired Magazine commented on the fact stating that “all those artifacts could have been systematically backed up over the years with photographs, scans” and continued stating that “the academic community has not yet fully embraced the importance of archiving,” causing an uproar on the Twittersphere because of the naïvety of such an accusation. The costs of mass digitization of all human culture are naturally prohibitive, given the time that would take, the funds needed for the reformatting process, and the maintenance of the digital data. Moreover, this also assumes that digitization is the creation of sorts of virtual clones of the original items that can be backed up on the cloud, like the photographs taken on mobile phones. To digitize is not to replicate an artifact in all its nature, and, as well understood by most today, digitization does not equal preservation.

Digitization does, however, capture information and create additional data sources that integrate (and transcend) the originals. These become supplementary objects of study that scholars can use in tandem with the object they capture, in turn informing research and work on the latter. On April 15, 2019, a fire beneath the roof of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris destroyed the covering and the spire, damaging the windows and the vaulted ceiling of the medieval church. In 2010, however, the late Andrew Tallon, art professor at Vassar College (New York), aided by Paul S. Blaer, senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, painstakingly captured the whole architectural structure, piece by piece, inside and outside, with a laser scanner (Leica ScanStation C10), collecting over one billion data points, accounting for around one terabyte of data. John Ochsendorf, structural engineer and historian of construction, with an interest in masonry mechanics, has described the data collected by Tallon and Blaer as essential to understanding the built geometry of the structure and for its reconstruction. Drawings and diagrams, in fact, would not capture all the imperfections and are not as accurate as laser scans, with their millimetric precision.