INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we will continue to investigate the elements of humanities scholarship, moving on to the object and artifact and to visual, aural and spatial studies, including performance and ritual. Not coincidentally with the rapid spread of digitization of all forms of scholarly communication, a new scholarly turn focuses on “materiality,” especially among premodernists influenced by anthropology, archaeology and new methodologies of textual editing of manuscript sources. As Walter Benjamin observed, in an age of technology and mass reproduction, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” His insight takes on new meaning as the digital realm ironically emphasizes the study both of the original and of its very materiality. Hence the digital humanities refocus our attention on the materials of scholarship long taken for granted in Leopold von Ranke's empiricist tradition as the passive – and transparent – media of reality. Materials now are seen to have their own agency that transforms our understandings about both their particular existence in time and space and about the larger grounding of reality that lies beyond them. In the digital era the relationship of the scholar and researcher to these materials creates a new dialog as the very notion of material existence comes into sharp focus in face of the all-leveling “0” and “1.”

At the same time, space and time take on new active agency in humanities scholarship as digital tools both offer new forms for their representation and inform the researcher and audience of the autonomy of these dimensions. Digital tools can now reproduce surface and depth in 3D modeling and 3D printing, offering vast new possibilities of reproduction and representation, while the uniqueness of the objects of study becomes both problematic and contested.