Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson: Text versus picture: Digital archives and the presentation of the past.

Perception of the past is often presented to the public by historians, scholars and other authors through textbooks, biographies and articles. Their source materials are often of archival nature: letters, diaries, miscellanies and documents which are quoted in length to give readers clearer view and insight into past events. By doing so, the text becomes more accessible to modern readers with readable font and font size, standardized spelling, added punctuation marks and other elements of editing.

However, this method also has its disadvantages as the visual impact of the text is lost in the process: the actual handwriting of the source material, its font size, font colour, spelling, punctuation marks, division of words between lines is not visible to modern readers and as a result, the source material loses a part of its value. This aspect of textual presentation has been addressed in the field of history (through the concept of “textual environment” and philology ( “material philology”) with its emphasis on the material embodiments of texts.

With increasing access to online images of archival material (e.g. www.handrit.is), historians and other scholars now have more options to expose their sources to the readers and thereby give their research added value. This can be attained by using more photographs of archival material in books, by referring readers to online photographs of source material, or by using rich media format with text, pictures, sounds and other forms of media. Museums, archives and libraries can have an active role in this development by digitizing their holdings in a similar way as The National and University of Iceland, The Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen and The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies have done by collaborating on the www.handrit.is website.

The paper will deal with these challenges.