I found Gailey’s discussion of the limitations of digital humanities really interesting. She explains how, even as digitization opens up new avenues of research and enables a wider audience to access difficult or rare texts, the act of digitizing requires decisions on what data to present and how that inevitably obscure aspects of the original. Gailey offers an example in the difficulty of rendering phonetic dialects. Digitization in this case was an attempt to make a particular work universally available and comprehensible; but this could not be done without altering the work. The solution to code “original” and “regularized” text was an innovative solution that drives home the point that digitization must be taken in a case by case basis. I’m very excited to learn about the particular difficulties presented in digitizing medieval manuscripts and the creative solutions people have discovered!
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