In and Out of the Presence of the Text
Reflections On Islamicate Manuscripts, Digitized and Otherwise
Much of my everyday work at present involves hours and hours each day working my way slowly through all sorts of Arabic-script manuscripts (that is, handwritten texts written in the Arabic script, but not necessarily the Arabic language) transcribing and lightly annotating each line over at least several pages, sometimes more. Much of the rest of my ‘professional’ time has been spent reading about and thinking about manuscript culture, the transition from manuscript to print, and the implications of the sorts of digital projects such as that in which I am a participant and for which I produce, at hours on end, transcriptions to be used as ‘training data.’
While our work has a number of goals, one of them is the creation of robust handwritten text recognition models and applications for Arabic script, something that is very much in the cutting-edge of what is currently possible. Although my contribution is primarily on the side of input and appraisal—do not ask me to explain the intricate details of what our computer scientist colleagues do—I have also been thinking hard about what this kind of work means, how it relates to the texts and pasts upon which we are working, and how this intersection of the quite old and ‘traditional’ technology of the handwritten book with new forms of digital technology can perhaps guide us out of some of the impasses and shortcomings of the very technological world that has made such things possible. In what follows I’d like to take you through some of these reflections, and hopefully articulate for you some of what I think these manuscripts mean as physical artefacts, what they do in terms of meaning and conveyance of presence, and what happens when we interact with them in digital environments.
I’d be lying if I said I always love my work, as some of it is downright tedious and not infrequently quite difficult and frustrating, thanks to either technical troubles on this end of the technological chronology or, more often, due to the nature of the scripts and hands which I must work at deciphering and rendering into a digital environment. That said, I do really love Islamicate manuscripts, in all of the languages in which I am competent (to varying degrees, I hasten to add). Arabic script is a sheer joy, equalled in my mind for visual dexterity and diversity and aesthetic pleasure only by Chinese and related characters (though no doubt someone well versed in the manuscript and calligraphic traditions of Latin script could propose examples from that tradition of equal beauty and versatility). I am constantly being surprised by the discovery of new styles, idiosyncratic hands, and remarkable layout features, the Arabic script having evolved over several centuries in many different contexts in order to record on the page a prodigious number of literary genres.
The laborious—as opposed to merely tedious—part of my work is due to the prolix diversity both Arabic script and the manuscript format permitted to develop. Arabic is capable of a very large range of ligatures—the connective tissue of letter-forms—when written by hand, as opposed to typographic printing, in which the range of ligatures must be considerably smaller, flexibility only partially recovered in recent digital fonts. And where the typographically printed page must follow a grid-like regularity of order and layout, the manuscript knows no such necessary restrictions. Text can ebb and flow across the page, main text, commentary, gloss, notations, corrections, and so on swirling together in a rich conglomerate, often the work of successive layers of readers and writers. There is a liveliness to many of these works, individual volumes (many of which were compilations, majmū’a in Arabic, of diverse successive texts) often growing over time as new owners added additional pages or cultivated new texts in the margins.
While I cannot say for sure what the first Islamicate manuscript I handled was, I do remember my first forays into Islamicate manuscripts, in the rare book and manuscripts reading room at Princeton University. There, as in many, perhaps all, archives in which the reader is permitted to handle manuscripts in person, the texts are contained within a careful ritual envelope, akin really to sacred objects. Foam cradles contain the delicate pages, soft cotton weights hold down the pages, and the reader must pay close attention to the pages lest they be damaged, while also ensuring that they remain flat enough to be read or photographed. But these texts, often quite diminutive in dimensions, have their own presence that demands close attention, reverence even.
There is indeed a mystique to the manuscript, Islamicate or otherwise, and it is not entirely an artefact of our modern-day distance from the lifeworlds that produced and reproduced and modified handwritten texts. The handwritten book was a charged artefact in the past, as well, it was a conduit and a source of power greater than the sum of its textual contents. The relative scarcity of books in the pre-modern, pre-print world (a condition that lasted well into the nineteenth century for Arabic-script languages) invested each book with a significance that is hard for us to grasp in our massively text-saturated present. Manuscripts are now scarce but for different reasons—they are held in special collections, their direct physical use restricted and regulated closely to avoid damage, theft, and the like. These restrictions, and the ‘allowances’ or lack thereof in the manuscript itself, will tend of necessity to push the reader out of the practices of print culture and into a different sort of encounter with the text.
To examine a manuscript in person, ‘in the flesh,’ is really an exercise in attention, it requires the focusing of the senses and a pushing aside of distractions. In the reading room one is permitted only a few items, the rest must remain in a locker; and because the manuscript must remain within the confines of the library, time ought not be wasted. The simple phsycial mechanics of the manuscript demand attention: the pages are often brittle, they do not always open or lie flat easily. And for many periods, including those upon which I have generally worked, manuscripts are often remarkably tiny, they would fit in my pocket, which translates into tiny script, sometimes to the point the use of a magnifying glass demands itself upon the reader (here the zoom feature is a very welcome benefit in the digital environment). Usually one can only have so many manuscripts out at a time, making switching back and forth among texts hard, if not impossible, to do. One cannot scroll rapidly through the pages, instead they must be turned carefully, one at a time. Doubtless for many pre-modern, pre-print readers there was a similar experience of attention, the manuscript in hand an object of constant return, read and re-read, annotated and repaired, copied and excerpted, the traces of such actions being often visible in the manuscripts that have survived down to the present. While we can detect such traces, and line up aspects of our experience with those of our distant predecessors, other aspects of the manuscript world are harder to recover in the present.
I am writing this article in a word-processing app, like I do almost everything else, my handwriting skills having greatly atrophied over the last decade or two. While my bookshelves contain several little pockets of clustered notebooks, within almost all of them blank pages predominate, and most are the wreckage of doomed attempts to invest in handwritten text. It has been hard to pay close attention for a very long time now in the Latin-script world, and the kind of relationship to the handwritten page that all literate people on earth once had is very hard for us to enter into. As we’ll see shortly, the digital environment complicates things further, though not necessarily in just ‘good’ and ‘bad’ directions.
There is a strange distance and a strange aliveness to the manuscript, a sense of a world we cannot reach, but which continues speaking with us and with which we continue to speak. We can read a manuscript more or less the way we might read a book, but the manuscript intrudes in ways typographic print does not: the cut across of the reader’s note, or a sprawling garden of marginalia commentary that keeps spilling over the border into the main text. The script itself keeps reminding us of its human origins, that someone’s hand bore down on this page, pen in hand, operating in the scribal flow of dipping the pen in the ink, trimming the nib, stirring the ink, wiping away spilled ink, adjusting the paper, and so on. Odd turns of a letter form, blots of ink, the filled-in eye of an ‘ayn when all the rest are open, skipped words or misspellings—a living, breathing, fallible person wrote these words down, struggled with the text, got tired, got inspired. Industrially manufactured items permit little if any such connectivity; most things in our daily lives are the work of vast collectives and wills and energies, only some of them human at all. The manuscript is not just a hand-work, it is a sort of hand-print, a physical trace of other human beings in which we continue to participate and upon which we leave our own traces.
In a sense a manuscript is akin to any other creaturely trace: the imprint of a raccoon in soft mud at the edge of a salt marsh, for instance, or the fossilized traces of Paleozoic arthropods scuttling about in an ancient sea, or, considerably closer (by geological time reckoning that is) to the milieu of the manuscript, preserved footprints of Paleolithic humans walking along a lake shore, say. While the dimension of deliberate information conveyance is unique in its sheer complexity (other organisms use traces of activity to send messages, to be sure), a careful observer can see evidence of bodily habits and processes in handwriting, as well as the resistance of the substrate or difficulties with the medium, ink not flowing as well as it should, paper not holding the ink the way the scribe intended. Slips of the hand, over-abundant flows of ink, the signs of weariness and haste, perhaps of a scribe growing hungry and ready to stop but needing to hit his quota for the day—all remind us quite vividly that a living breathing organism, a human one, made these signs, took pen in hand and pressed it to a physical page. While the digital ‘page’ puts us at a somewhat further distance, it can also magnify these traces, letting us zoom in and out of pages easily to appraise the particularities of the scribe’s hand’s motion across the page and the affordances and resistances of the paper itself.
Presence, the presence of life and of the quotidian material worlds in which we all must live and make our livings, the presence of the human creature striving to leave a trace of himself (and, on considerably rarer occasions in the Islamicate milieu, herself) while, more often than not, conveying the words of others—the handwritten text conveys such presence in a way the is simply not possible for print books. What then happens when we encounter these texts, not in the hushed environment of the library or the archive, but on our computer screens, in whatever physical environment we happen to find ourselves?
I’ll limit myself in trying to answer that question, focusing primarily on the particular digital work I’ve been doing these last few months. As noted above, much of my present work involves digital transcription of manuscripts into a form that can be used for training data, specifically, for the creation of tools to enable some degree of handwritten-text recognition and hence the ability to search within and across manuscripts for purposes of discovery and analysis, among other things. While it is certainly a topic worthy of analysis and debate, I’ll put aside for now the ethics and mechanics of those future usages; instead, I’d like to consider just what I’m doing when I do the quotidian work of transcription. First, it’s worth noting that in order to collect texts to transcribe, I am privy to a vast, and ever growing, world of digitized texts; where the medieval or early modern scribe had to work with whatever happened to be available in his locale, I can select from almost the full gamut of historical diversity of the Arabic script, a really quite dizzying availability. It can be easy to get lost in the sheer flood of manuscripts, an information deluge that of course has many, many parallels in the print and post-print world.
That said, my interaction with the text does have some parallels with that of the pre-modern scribe, even if my tools are quite different and physically intensive in ways other than they were for the scribe. Going line by line I must pay close attention, which is rendered both easier and harder by the digital environment. I am less attentive to the layout of the text on the page, as my transcription proceeds line-by-line, each individual line contained within a viewer, the original text above, the space for my transcription below. In lieu of a pen I have a keyboard; my fingers and hands and arms tire in a different manner, but they still grow weary after several hours of such work. While I do not have to pause to sharpen my nib, I must turn my eyes away from the computer screen; I remind myself to get up, go outside and check on the garden beds, then come back indoors and sit back down to my scribal task.
I make mistakes which must be corrected, often for the same reasons the scribes themselves made mistakes: an unfamiliar word, a hard to interpret letter-form, physical weariness, outside distractions. As I adjust to a given scribal hand in a particular style I train myself to recognize the scribe’s particularities of letter form and other choices, and after a couple pages can get into a ‘flow,’ which however can also translate into careless mistakes, and so review is always necessary. Where my predecessor had to work hard against the physical substrate or content himself to annotation above the line or in the margins my mistakes upon correction are only registered in the transcription platform’s log, and any future readers, human or machine, of my scribal work will not register them at all.
Perhaps the most striking difference—and this common not just to the digital but to print in general—is the general erasure of my particular identity from the lines I am producing. To be sure, somewhere in the future documentation we will collectively produce for our end products my name will be mentioned, along with everyone else who produced the training data used in the project. Buried behind the graphic interface there are traces of my activity, to be sure, but in the letterforms themselves there is no such trace, no sign of my particular hand. Any other person could type the same letters and they would appear exactly the same; only if moved from one font to another would they change. Of course this kind of mass production, homogenizing effect is hardly unique, it is a typical feature of industrial modernity, cropping up again and again, always a little jarring, running up against that other great fixture of modernity, the—supposed—centrality of the individual. Here as elsewhere though, the individual disappears into the background, his or her trace absorbing into that of everyone else.
There is a degree to which something similar is true of mansuscripts, too, of course: a very good calligrapher could write in such a way that his hand was basically indistinguishable from another expert hand, though, at least, in such cases he would almost always sign the colophon of his work, attaching his name and asking for the reader’s prayers on behalf of his soul. In probably the majority of manuscripts, however, individual hands are relatively easy to note, their imperfections and variances visual proof of the individuals who wrote them.
I’m tempted to make some grand pronounements about the nature of modernity and industrialization and the transformation of the self, but I’m going to resist the temptation. I’m still working out for myself the deeper meanings and resonances of manuscript culture and of what our work as ‘digital humanists’ means for these cultural artefacts and our encounters with them, with what we can do with them and what they might do to us. What I will leave you with is the suggestion that the digital manuscript is a good way to cultivate attention, even in a digital world that tends to diminish and destroy attention. No matter what tools we develop, there are no easy and absolute shortcuts in this milieu; there is always some degree of resistance, difficulty, individuality, that must be navigated. At best, I think, digital engagement permits us a different kind of presence and engagement than physical encounters with such texts and artefacts, and has the potential for more. As such, I remain cautiously optimistic, and will continue plugging away at my work, not just because I’m being paid to do so, but because there is real potential for greater understanding and encounter by means of digital environments and tools, provided we remain cautious and resolutely aware of what we are—and are not—capable of doing in this medium.
Digital Humanists