Stained (Glass) Codex

The image and its underlying research was created by James Ascher, based on collaborative work with Sarah Berkowitz, during their partnered DH Prototyping Fellowships.

When we treat a book like a historical physical artifact—and not just a vessel for its literary contents—what stories can it tell us?

This mosaic visualization modifies page scans of Samuel Butler’s Genuine Remains (vol II; Tonson, 1759) to magnify physical human traces & other visual features of the page we might otherwise miss:

“These marks suggest things that happened to the book as it was read or handled…We can note the more heavily soiled pages as a way of suggesting—perhaps bolstered with evidence from other copies—the pages that were most read, at least by people with dirty fingers.” -James Ascher, “Visualizing Paper Evidence Using Digital Reproductions”

As a collection of descriptions of “Theophrastan Characters”—stereotypes such as “An Amorist” (“His Passion is as easily set on Fire as a Fart, and as soon out again”)—it wouldn’t be surprising if the most enjoyed pages were turned to more than others.

The book’s pages were digitized in 48 bit color, then the paper’s color space was stretched to the whole visible range, representing 11 million colors (mostly shades of pale yellow and brown). The layout mimics the imposition scheme for octavo sheets, the format in which the book was originally printed—representing the human labor that went into the creation of both the original physical and new digital artifacts.

Special thanks to UVA Library’s Digital Production Team for digitizing these pages, and Amanda Wyatt Visconti had the image printed on transparent film and mounted it on a lightbox.

Collaborators:

• James Ascher, image creator & associated direct research
• Sarah Berkowitz, collaborator on larger research project
• UVA Library’s Digital Production Team, digitized paper codex used to conduct this research
• Amanda Wyatt Visconti, conversion of digital project to physical lightbox