Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World.

• Author: Kalvesmaki, Joel

Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World. By L. W. C. VAN LIT. Handbook of Oriental Studies, I, vol. 137. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. xi + 333. $150, [euro]125, open access: https://brill.com/view/title/56196.

Among Digitized Manuscripts will be a helpful starting point for any student or scholar who endeavors to add computer skills to her or his research and teaching. Founder and editor of The Digital Orientalist, L. W. C. van Lit addresses scholars who work intensely with primary textual sources, especially through manuscripts, but who have little or no grounding in technology.

Van Lit writes in a brisk style, avoiding jargon and unexplained terminology, although there are occasional lapses. The eight chapters fall, by my reading, into three broad areas I will call theory, gathering, and application.

For theory, the first chapter--one of the longest, excluding code--stands on its own. Van Lit presents and defends a tripartite view of book culture, arguing that manuscripts, books, and digital files stand as three distinct archetypes of written culture, and are more unalike than alike. He makes numerous observations that will likely provoke, annoy, or happily surprise. Even those assertions I think false (e.g., "For digital documents, it is the author who is the producer" [p. 18]) or underdeveloped ("[l]n a digital world, a canon is formed and changed fast" [p. 21]) are worthwhile for prompting the reader to develop his or her own alternatives. This chapter can be read independently of the rest of the book, and would be a useful catalyst for classroom discussions about the nature of text.

Chapters two through five and the first section of chapter six deal with how to gather material. Being deeply interested in manuscript culture, the author focuses on digitized manuscripts. Chapter two lays down some basic theories or principles of digital codicology that are then tested in chapter three, through a survey of major online collections of images of Islamic manuscripts. Van Lit proposes ten measures by which online collections should be assessed. His findings are an important first step in evaluating and ranking services that make available manuscript images.

Chapter four deals with digital methodology in paleography, with an interlude devoted to the question of how projects should be built and funded. The interlude is important and underdeveloped, leaving this reader to wish that it had been its own...