As suggested throughout this book, digital transformations do not simply make individuals, organizations or societies more transparent. What happens is rather an intensification of the need to manage visibilities – to consider what to make (in)visible and how to guide attention. So far, my main concern has been to suggest what these developments mean for individuals and organizations, but now the focus shifts to broader societal issues. That is, how do hopes about digital transparency and processes of visibility management shape the way we think about societies and political affairs? Looking at such different phenomena as state control, corporate reporting, social editing and attempts to govern future affairs, the chapter offers an account of visibility management as a form of social ordering.

There is an important historical backdrop to this. Transparency is intimately tied to the project of modernity – the hope for technological progress, human perfectability and scientific scrutiny and rationality. But transparency is also an Enlightenment ideal that largely remains unchallenged, despite its limitations and obvious ties to phenomena such as totalitarianism and surveillance.

Media and other technologies make new forms of human action possible, and they do so not only as devices of information, but also as “agencies of order” (Peters, 2015). Such ordering effects are well described and well theorized in existing research on the societal consequences of media and digital technologies. What is less pronounced is that digital transformations have consequences for how our attention is guided, both as individuals and as organizations and societies. That is, they make us see, know and govern in new ways, and shape what we think of as reality. To explore these issues, it may be useful to return to insights from earlier thinking that articulated the relationship between media and human realities and how mediations shape social life. At the advent of modern journalism and news media, Lippmann (1922) reminded us that media put “pictures in our heads.” Such pictures condition how humans act on the world, and to study the power of media, Lippmann suggested, we need to articulate how such special interests come to control our view of the world (Turner, 2014). These issues are still salient today, where new types of corporations are taking up roles that are comparable to those of media conglomerates of the past. Not only are tech companies taking over large parts of social infrastructures and becoming the primary spaces for social interaction and entry points for news and other societally important forms of information.

FOR STUDYING MANUSCRIPTS, scholars have critiqued both text and 2D images. Of the latter, my earlier chapters provide sufficient critique in pointing out material features that normally go uncaptured when manuscripts are digitized. However, this critique becomes strengthened when a manuscript is viewed as more than its text and decoration, whether as a holistic expression or as a socially transmitted interaction. For example, Elaine Treharne points out that a physical encounter is necessary to gauge a manuscript's heft. Heft portrays crucial information about socially transmitted interactions, such as a sense of portability (for missionary travel) or grandeur (for large gatherings). Critiques of this nature recognize that manuscripts are meant to be engaged by human bodies, demanding first-hand experience for knowing.

Although scholars have identified shortcomings in 2D images, they have likewise identified shortcomings in textual remediation. In Virtually Anglo-Saxon, Martin Foys demonstrates how textual descriptions of the Bayeux Tapestry reconstruct it linearly, remaking it into a radically different form from its physical embodiment. Such a representation can encourage misinterpretation and flawed conclusions. For a Chi-Rho page or page of text organized around the interplay of decorated initials, the artistry guides the eye and shapes the experience of the content and its meaning. By altering the journey to meaning, meaning is lost and/ or reshaped.

With these critiques in mind, this chapter explores virtual reality (VR) as a response to and an alternative for studying manuscripts. It recognizes that VR is likewise imperfect and will struggle to duplicate physical attributes such as the smell of parchment. However, VR represents a profound shift for studying manuscripts. It provides a shared space for a digital encounter, eliminating the barrier of a screen. To understand the significance of this shared space, I turn to neuroscientists. Rather than accept the notion of five isolated senses inherited from Aristotle, neuroscientists have identified twentytwo to thirty-three. They have also demonstrated that perceptions such as sight are constructed using information from multiple senses. A digital technique that focuses on one isolated sense, therefore, provides a limited representation of human experience of a manuscript.

IF I WERE TO choose a mantra for the digital humanities, it would be “open access.” As a guiding principle, open access makes the digital transformational. It delivers digital content onto the hard drives of scholars and the public. But even when manuscripts are only viewable through high-resolution images, presenting them online radically increases their availability, as radically as the printing press once increased availability of texts. As stated in the epigraph, the rapid pace of these changes feels like science fiction, as if “cheating on a cosmic scale.” At this writing, the Vatican Library has 14,623 manuscripts online, its goal to provide online access to all of its 80,000 manuscripts. Yet this is only a mere portion of the manuscripts available. More than five hundred libraries worldwide provide online viewing of at least some of their collection. The recentness of this availability is exemplified by the St. Chad Gospels. In 2009, because neither a printed facsimile nor a full set of online images were available, I travelled to England to study the manuscript. Prior to this, I had relied on a few photographs reproduced in scholarly works and a small number of low-resolution images placed online through a British Library Turning the Pages interface. The images were inadequate. The low resolution made features of the manuscript impossible to study. Such features are critical for understanding early Christian and monastic practices in the British Isles. But they are also critical for telling the story of the artistic and scribal accomplishments that lead to the Book of Kells, generally considered the flowering of Insular art. My need for access made travelling to Lichfield Cathedral a necessity, a necessity that if not fulfilled would limit my scholarship, similar to ways lack of access has limited scholarship on manuscripts throughout the ages.

METHODS OF RECOVERY have not always been kind to manuscripts. Concealing knowledge, damaged pages have long tantalized with traces of effaced script. To entice them to give up their secrets, reagents were applied, a practice which began at least in the seventeenth century but was more rigorously pursued in the nineteenth century. The results, however, were disastrous. These chemicals, such as gallic acid and ammonium sulphide, were theorized to revitalize inks. Instead, they did so only temporarily, before turning a page into something less than its previous self: regularly a brown slur (Web Fig. 1.1). Relying on the best knowledge of their day, such attempts remain a cautionary tale about the complex chemistry and fragility of the seemingly simple and common medieval materials of ink, pigment, and parchment.

Creating a theoretical frame for digital methods, early photography provided a means to recover damaged content through noninvasive techniques. It marked a critical turn from chemistry to physics, that is, recovery based on the properties of light. Early experiments generated new methods, such as using orange lighting to increase contrast and coloured filters to reduce “the obscuring effects of stains.” More complex methods demonstrated further possibilities. For example, in the early twentieth century, Pringsheim and Gradeviss devised a method for recovering erased text from palimpsests. This method required two film negatives: the first focused as sharply as possible on the erased script; the second focused equally on the two. To make the erased script more pronounced, Pringsheim and Gradeviss made a glass positive of the second negative (equal focus) and aligned and overlaid it with the negative focused on the erased script. When examined under a light, the glass positive helped to neutralize the later writing, making traces of the erased script stand out. Such early techniques exemplify the overarching goal for recovery through noninvasive photographic methods: capitalize on properties of light to increase contrast, revealing that which has been lost to the unaided eye.

FOR MONITORING CHANGES in manuscripts, scholars and conservators have long recognized the value of photography. In the 1980s, to check for damage, conservators at the British Library compared earlier photographs of the Lindisfarne Gospels to the manuscript. However, assessing cultural heritage through photographs has its origins in the earliest days of photography. For example, shortly after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre successfully demonstrated his daguerreotype in Paris (1839), the French Commission des Monuments Historiques hired five photographers to capture images of the nation's architectural heritage. Responsible for its preservation, the Commission wished to assess the conditions of historic sites throughout France, many not accessible by rail. This lack of access by rail echoes access to the past conditions of manuscripts. Both require photography. Now, the digital opens ways for understanding these past conditions and the aging processes of manuscripts by extending what can be known from historical photographs.

Digitized photographs provide three major advantages over printed ones. First, once digitized, photographs can be overlaid, and the transparency of the top image adjusted. This eliminates reliance on side-by-side comparisons and looking back-andforth, making losses easier to identify. Second, while overlay benefits identifying losses, it becomes more beneficial when images align. Because the content of digitized images is malleable, such alignment is possible, a digital process called registration. Through overlay and transparency, comparing registered images makes smaller differences more apparent. It also enables identifying differences through computer-assisted means, such as subtracting one image from another. Through subtraction, resulting images reveal miniscule changes that otherwise likely go unnoticed, such as losses measuring .1 mm in diameter. Third, digitizing historical photographs preserves them in a digital form, allowing them to be collected and redundantly stored, safeguarding their irreplaceable content.

In this chapter, I demonstrate the value of and provide an approach for digitizing, registering, and comparing historical photographs. I make this case, however, not simply to propose a practice worthy of becoming best practice whenever digitizing a manuscript. Because of its unprecedented benefits, I want to encourage its practice even when a major digitization of a manuscript is not at hand. Information gained from digitizing historical photographs is far too important to ignore and too valuable to risk losing. In my work with the St.

HOW A MANUSCRIPT reflects light changes over time. Folios become worn, damaged, and effaced. Humans make erasures, and more dramatically, wash or scrape away text to produce palimpsests. But also, there is the unrelenting hand of time, the gradual deterioration of inks and pigments, the slow discolouration and stiffening of parchment. Folios grow visually mysterious, like the enigmatic descriptions of common things in medieval riddles. Whether describing a wax tablet or an icicle, Aldhelm's riddles and those preserved in the Exeter Book tease readers with their baffling descriptions. As Patrick Murphy points out, Old English riddles start with phrases such as, “wunderlicu wiht, wondrous creature, something rich and strange,” giving voice to an inanimate object and transforming it into a mysterious being. As a folio ages, it too transforms into something rich and strange, turning into a wunderlicu wiht. Its lost pigments and ink make it an enigma waiting to be known.

Even for pages that have escaped severe damage, mysteries abound. There is much to be explored in the materiality of a manuscript. Pages are rich repositories of history: quality of parchment, types of pigments, wear from use, and markings from travels, all make manuscripts instructive witnesses to the medieval world and beyond. In the eighth-century St. Chad Gospels (Lich MS 1), the manuscript central to this study, enigmas exist about its damaged and erased text but also about its dry-point writing, the identity of its organic pigments, the number of artists and scribes who made it, and even where it was made. As with fellow manuscripts from the Insular period (ca. 600– 850, British Isles), few records survive, and even basic information, such as provenance, presents limited and misleading clues. But scholars have methods to coax knowledge from such limits. Paleographers urge insight by categorizing types of scripts and comparing the anatomy of letters. Codicologists explore layout, quires, and overall structures, revealing relations within a manuscript and correspondences among manuscripts and monasteries. Textual scholars study and trace biblical versions, and for early manuscripts such as the St. Chad Gospels, they have identified features such as recensions from Jerome's Vulgate to demonstrate traditions of texts and geographic relations among manuscripts. Like other scholarly approaches, advanced techniques of digital imaging have methods for teasing out insight.

IF NORMAL DIGITIZATION has an alter ego, it is reflectance transformation imaging (RTI). Digitization generally treats all surface details as equal in the eyes of lighting. If shadows occur, they are removed, using techniques such as flat-field correction. This, in effect, turns a page into a flat surface. By contrast, RTI celebrates a page as a play of light. It revels in how each detail participates, capturing these dynamics for pigment, parchment, and ink. For example, as discussed in Chapter 1, recovering the yellow pigment orpiment is important because it emulates divine wisdom, its light pouring forth from the page. To make the effect of light more dynamic, artists layered pigments, generating textured swells of colour that increase the complexity of reflected light. For the later Book of Kells, Bernard Meehan has speculated that such layering had a further aim: through aging, cracking, and chipping, layered pigments would generate an evolving and enriched interplay of colour and light. For an illuminated manuscript such as the St. Chad Gospels, this interplay is an essential part of religious expression. Unfortunately, normal digitization fails to capture its dynamics.

By removing shadow, digitization not only diminishes the visual experience of a page, but it also conceals material details. As mentioned, multiple scholars critique interpretation that overlooks the contributions of materiality to meaning. In the example of the portrait of Mark, the shimmer of orpiment is echoed in how the artist portrays him, stepping onto the decorative border, the threshold of the page. It implies that Mark is stepping into the world, opening a path from the sacred and into the physical. To miss the material effect of orpiment is to miss its echoing of Mark's gesture, an emphasis that provides a cosmological orientation for entering the gospels. Such use of materiality is central to complex artistic expression, its triumph perhaps best expressed by the twelfth-century Welshman Giraldus Cambrensis. Upon seeing an early Irish gospelbook, he exclaims that it “must have been the result of work, not of men, but of angels.” Contemplating the rich history of such artistic expression, the twentieth-century philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer concludes that aesthetic experience is the epistemic contribution of the humanities. By stifling the experience of materiality, normal digitization limits access to humanistic epistemic content.