Anna Chen holds an M.S.I.S. from The University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale University. Her research interests include medieval and children's literature, digital humanities, and archives and museum studies.
This is the source
As museums increasingly place archival materials on display, a body of scholarship has emerged to provide practical advice for staff about exhibiting handwritten documents. However, there has as yet been little scholarship that problematizes the exhibition of manuscripts and the responses they elicit from their audiences. This essay, then, investigates the cultural perception of handwriting as an inherently unique and authentic embodiment of its writer, the assumption of which lies behind its display. Through a series of close readings of responses to the sight of the autograph, I examine the ways in which handwriting’s association with the human body has been historically shaped and interpreted; its current function as a locus for concerns about the loss or degradation of corporeal identity in an increasingly technologized world; and how multimedia museum exhibitions of handwritten documents — as digitally manipulable surrogates of original artifacts — expose, complicate, and break down the oppositions in this cultural discourse. Ultimately, I argue, digital interactives are part of a new exhibitionary paradigm, which not only offers new ways of considering an artifact’s essential meaning, but also refines and redefines our understanding of human effort, intentionality, and embodiment in a digital age.
Reconsidering the digital exhibition of manuscripts
On attending a recent exhibit on Emily Dickinson at the New York Botanical Garden library in 2010 that included a display of her autograph letters and poems, Holland Cotter of the
To see Dickinson’s verse written in her inimitably rangy hand is always a moving experience
a letter in which the author pretty much wrenches out his wounded, gin-soaked heart and smears it across the paper via his always meticulous handwriting
the most astonishing pieces were the handwritten letters and manuscripts. Simple as they seem, intact yellow-tinted sheets of paper full of words and exquisite cursive, these pages reveal the absolute innermost mind of Poe in his own hand
As these comments from a range of audiences demonstrate, the display of handwritten
documents often elicits immediate and emotional responses from viewers, who imagine
the creators of these documents to be uniquely — or to use Cotter’s term,
While this practical advice is extremely helpful, there has been little scholarship
that problematizes the practice of exhibiting manuscripts and the responses they
elicit from audiences.
Scholars who have theorized the aura of the autograph focus on its embodiment of
individual identity in contrast to the chilly impersonality of print.autograph
: though it can refer specifically to a
person’s signature, it can also mean any writing in one’s own hand. Throughout
this paper, I use the term in the sense of this latter, broader definition.every person looks the same
look machine-made, as they are…This is an insistent world of
cold, non-human, facts
There is no such thing as two people
writing identically…handwriting is a unique and authentic
The autograph embodies its writer, so
uniquely identifying and identified with him that the reproduction of authentic
handwriting risks being considered a forgery signature
that
claims to guarantee the presence of an individual writer during a historically
unique moment of writing. This subjectivity is physically inscribed in the
movement and the pressure of the pen led across the paper, leaving there an
unexchangeable, personal trace.
For these theorists, then, the original
autograph is its equally original
author, seemingly inseparable from the idiosyncratic and singular self embodied by
his or her handwriting. This sense of embodiment approaches and even becomes
indistinguishable from the literal. Throughout this essay, I will use the term
the
hearts of men that once moved in gorgeous orbits beat in them still
so strongly does the mere handwriting
sometimes bring before me those who have long moldered in the dust that there are
some signatures,
like those of Philip II, Tomás de Torquemada, and Charles
IX, which I could not bear to keep in my
collection, such horror would they excite
The manuscript of a novel in the
handwriting of the author — especially if he be long dead and therefore famous —
possesses an appeal unsurpassed by anything else. Here is the novel, the poem or
the essay just as it was transferred from the brain by way of the hand to the
paper on which it was written. No printers had done this job. For months and years
the man himself has toiled over these sheets, his own fingers have held the pen,
his own eyes have followed the course of the ink as it ran in readable streams
across the page, his innermost thoughts have been rendered visible by the magic
scribble that turns them into words for all the world to see if it will. The man
puts himself upon those sheets as surely as he draws the breath of life. Other men
transform his words into type and others bind them up, but he alone has a brain, a
heart and a soul into the thing we afterward call a book.
For these collectors, the value of script lies not only in its expression of the
writer’s
At the same time, however, the existence of and anxiety over the possibility of
forgery — the unauthorized assumption of another person’s identity through his or her
writing — call attention to the potential instability and illegitimacy of
handwriting, and handwriting’s history is accordingly bound up with the history of
competing technological means of authentication. As early as ninth-century England,
documents were authenticated through the author’s handwriting as well as his seal.
Yet handwriting and seals were understood in the Middle Ages to have different, and
sometimes competing, cultural valences. A medieval seal typically contained an
inscription bearing the owner’s name, which enabled him to sign his name identically
with each imprint Not only by intent but also in practice a seal does exactly
the same as the printing press: it reliably copies and multiplies information by
mechanical means
who know the handwriting
of the clerk who was chirographer when it was made
This latter automation of the cross is a striking appropriation of the written sign
of authentication, since prior to King Edward’s introduction of the great seal in the
late eleventh century, Anglo-Saxon charters seem to have been authenticated primarily
by just such handwritten crosses, whereby each cross was accompanied by a witness’s
name written by a priestly scribe as a record of his oath made in the presence of the
crucified Christ I, Earl Hugh, and my barons have confirmed all
these things in the presence of Archbishop Anselm [of Canterbury] not only by
my seal but also by the seal of Almighty God, that is the sign of the holy
cross, so that each of us makes a sign of the cross with his own hand as
evidence for posterity
(Ego comes Hugo et mei barones confirmavimus ista
omnia coram Anselmo archiepiscopo, non solum sigillo meo sed etiam sigillo dei
omnipotentis, id est signo sancte crucis + , ita quod singuli nostrum propria
manu in testimonium posteris signum in filii eius
with his own
hand,
which he describes as the seal of Almighty God, that is the sign of the holy cross.
The
handwritten cross, then, functions as a conduit for God’s will; moreover, it
indicates the presence not only of its human creator but also of the divine
Creator, for it both commemorates and reproduces Christ’s crucifixion, the
culmination of God’s embodied presence on earth.a behavioral biometric modality that analyzes dynamic
characteristics of an individual’s signature, such as shape of signature, speed
of signing, pen pressure when signing, and pen-in-air movements, for
recognition
These technologies of authentication, each with very different cultural resonances,
continue to complement, contest, and appropriate each other as modes of identity
production and authentication. I do not mean to suggest that one mode is actually
more automatic or impersonal than another, or even that automation necessarily
implies impersonality. Rather, I wish to highlight the different cultural emphases
assigned to these technologies that render them conceptually opposed to each other.
In the Middle Ages, handwriting was understood as embodied, a tangible sign of human
and divine presence and intention as expressed through the bodily movement of the
hand. By contrast, seals lacked such validation of the human creator’s and divine
Creator’s physical presence, although, as marks of secular, legal authenticity, they
continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages, often in tandem with handwritten
signs.
On November 5, 1994, in a two-page handwritten letter faxed to news organizations and
addressed to the American public, former President Ronald Reagan wrote, My fellow Americans, I have recently been
told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with
Alzheimer’s disease
I, too, cried at that letter, with its crabbed script and enormous margin (so evocative of the blizzard whitening his mind)... Script’s primary power is to convey the cursive flow of human thought, from brain to hand to pen to ink to eye — every waver, every loop, every character trembling with expression. Type has no comparable warmth; matrix dots and laser sprays and pixels of L.C.D. interpose their various screens between writer and reader. If Mr. Reagan’s letter (which, by the way, he composed entirely himself) had been keyboarded to the world, instead of handwritten and issued in facsimile, its poignancy would have been reduced by half.
Both Reagan, in choosing to handwrite the letter, and Morris, in affirming that
choice, seem to resist what Jay Bolter and David Grusin have theorized as
remediation, the logic by which new media refashions prior media through the
imbricated strategies of immediacy, a style of representation that seeks to erase the
traces of its presence in order to convince the viewer of his unmediated relationship
to the medium’s contents, and hypermediacy, which seeks to keep the medium at the
forefront of the viewer’s perception
Reagan’s decision to write his letter by hand must be read in terms of handwriting’s
lengthy history as a representative of, and even a conduit for, embodied identity.
His awareness of the aura of handwritten documents is evident in Morris’s description
of the way in which President Reagan went
so far as to address and seal his personal mail, and...he was known to lick his
own stamps. I treasure several letters from him written on thick ivory
gold-embossed stock, each with its matching envelope meticulously inscribed, down
to the last digit of my Zip Code
In particular, Reagan’s recognition of handwriting’s implication of social intimacy
is one of several ways in which he draws on the immediacy of the handwritten format.
Reagan thus begins his 1994 letter with a salutation to his fellow Americans
;
he continues to inscribe this familiarity throughout, seeking to downplay social,
political, and economic differences between himself and his readers. When he writes
of the onerous burden of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient that I am confident that with your help [Nancy Reagan] will face
it with faith and courage,
he encourages his readers’ fictive inclusion in
his wife’s intimate circle, and concludes the letter with a brief but warm
acknowledgement of their social closeness: Thank you, my friends
Yet the letter was not delivered to any individual, but rather sent by fax machine to
news organizations around the country that reported on its contents the following day
Modern discourse on technologically enhanced quality of life is frequently inflected
with an anxiety that, as Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley have pointed out, often
reflects on the ways in which biotechnology may augment organic life to such an
extent that...the label
Similarly, Timothy Lenoir has described the notion that digital information
is a disembodied pattern that exists independently of any specific material medium as
human
may no longer be applicable. As the Human
Genome Project promises to unlock the secrets of our genetic makeup, the Visible
Human Project attempts to translate the human body into digital codes, and
neurological scientists move closer to explaining how consciousness arises from
physical matter, so these fields of research threaten to destroy the myth that
each human being has a core of unique individuality that can neither be explained
nor replicated...Biotechnology…has the capacity to transform the parameters of the
human body into a potentially unrecognizable form. one of the dominant metaphors of our
time
Morris’s characterization of matrix dots and L.C.D. pixels as lacking in warmth, in
contrast to his valorization of script, whose every waver, every loop, every character trembl[es] with
expression,
is a response to this perception of the human body as an
increasingly expendable medium as it becomes progressively more dependent on
technology for its own sustenance. For Morris, handwriting without the aid of digital
machinery retains a human quality that machine-produced writing has lost. Reagan’s
choice to handwrite his letter, then, underscores its purpose as a revelation
specifically about his physical health, drawing on the close association of
handwriting with the inner workings of the human body in contrast to other media.
Indeed, the letter avoids many other signs of mechanical modernity, erasing, for
example, the fax machine’s role as one of the letter’s communicative media and
encouraging the fiction that the original letter has been delivered directly to
the American people.
Similarly, it elides the biotechnologies at work in
preserving Reagan’s health. The letter’s strategies of erasure, driven by this sense
of human alienation in an age of digital information and biotechnology, serve to
fashion itself and Reagan’s body as interchangeable entities by obscuring the
technologies that would assist in extending human agency or health. In the past,
Reagan writes, Nancy suffered from breast cancer and I had
cancer surgeries. We found through our open disclosures we were able to raise
public awareness. We were happy that as a result many more people underwent
testing. They were treated in early stages and able to return to normal, healthy
lives
technologies of health
Instead, what the letter foregrounds is the Reagans’ decision to write it at all.
Upon learning this news,
Reagan explained, Nancy and I had to
decide whether as private citizens we would keep this a private matter or whether
we would make this news known in a public way
open disclosures,
including the public display of the letter itself,
that many people were able to return to
normal, healthy lives.
According to Nancy Reagan, People didn’t realize that Alzheimer’s was a disease like
any other...They were embarrassed or self-conscious, and the letter released them
to admit that somebody in their family had Alzheimer’s. It’s a beautiful
letter
This concept of restorative handwriting has historical precedence. As the polemical
rhetoric about technology’s capacity for dehumanization gained momentum in the first
decades of the twentieth century, graphologists’ advice columns proliferated,
promising to discover identities within their readers’ handwriting that had been lost
to or obscured from them. Show me your
handwriting and I will tell you who you are,
graphologist Nadya Olyanova
encouraged her readers familiar writing
you may see the mirror which will reveal yourself to yourself
Yet it is precisely this publicity – and its obverse, privacy – that turn out to be
the most slippery aspects of the letter, informing its various levels of immediacy
and hypermediacy. Handwriting here is hypermediated: that is, the viewer is meant to
notice and interpret the medium as carrying a message of its own. The viewer,
however, perceives this hypermediacy as immediacy, in Bolter and Grusin’s sense of
the word: that is, he feels that he has direct access to the content of the medium.
But in fact, the viewer substitutes medium for matter; when Reagan’s handwriting is
perceived as an embodiment of its creator, it does not convey precisely the same
message as the letter's actual content about Reagan's physical health, but rather
offers a heightened, more authentic
version of it. I use authentic
as
Bolter and Grusin use it here: Hypermedia
and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire to get past
the limits of representation and achieve the real. They are not striving for the
real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the
viewer’s experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore
authentic) emotional response
primary power is to convey the cursive flow of human thought, from brain to hand
to pen to ink to eye,
the medium of script so overshadows the letter’s
actual contents that Morris virtually never quoted directly from it. Instead, the
letter’s message is contained in the visuality of the medium itself. He interpreted
the crabbed script
as evidence of Reagan’s physical degeneration, and the
unusually wide margins as the blizzard
whitening of his mind.
The letter, however, not only does not mention
these details concerning Reagan's physical and mental condition, but in fact
deliberately eschews them by placing Reagan’s onset of Alzheimer’s at some future
point: I am one of the millions of
Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease,
Reagan writes.
At the moment, I feel just
fine
Morris was not alone in valorizing what he calls the human immediacy of script
and its direct and enduring
quality.
According to Richard Norton Smith, then director of the Reagan Presidential Library
in Simi Valley, California, Reagan’s letter prompted more than 25,000 letters in
reply, many handwritten in ink, crayon, and pencil. The letters crossed age groups,
geographical boundaries, and political affiliations The Great Communicator
during his political career, and
the vast number of letters he wrote while in office, many to those he called the
uncommon people,
testify to his desire to connect with his constituents.
But, of course, the American public was limited in its familiarity with Reagan; like
all public figures, he is knowable only to a certain point, and his desire for
personal revelation extended only so far. Earlier in life, during his acting career,
Reagan paid his mother, Nelle, to answer his fan mail; she wrote thousands of letters
in Reagan’s name not only to movie fans, but also to his longtime friends, signing
the letters Dutch,
Ron,
or Ronnie
Reagan’s office in Century City declined to
discuss his current medical condition, citing respect for his privacy
Reagan’s unreadable body is perceived as perfectly legible because of its viewers’
expectations about handwriting’s ability to embody its creator. This emotional
response to the public display of Reagan’s handwriting, moreover, is echoed in the
exhibition reviews with which this essay began, describing the sight of Emily
Dickinson’s handwriting as a
As the embodied nature of handwriting is reinforced by a culture increasingly structured by seemingly disembodied digital information, it is also becoming increasingly hypermediated, loaded with emotional meaning and significance to the point of obscuring its other messages. Handwriting is becoming, in other words, an opaque medium, an eventuality compounded by its increasing literal illegibility, which is not only a practical result of the obsolescence of penmanship courses and of people’s diminishing opportunities and inclinations to read and produce handwriting, but also as an ideological reaction against the uniformity of print. As handwriting is idiosyncratic where print is regular, so it is literally illegible where print is readable: handwritten signatures, for example, have evolved into consciously undecipherable scrawls in a digital world in which signatures are virtually the only words people still write by hand.
In 1789, Benjamin Franklin likened the uniformity of print to the effacement of
people’s faces, which he believed rendered the text less legible because it made
individual letters less distinctive. Writing to Noah Webster about the new printing
practice of discarding the long certainly the omitting this prominent letter
makes the line appear more even; but renders it less immediately legible; as the
paring all Men’s Noses might smooth and level their Faces, but would render their
Physiognomies less distinguishable
Museums are not about to display the floppies of any
contemporary Flaubert. Or, if they do, I doubt they will attract the sort of awe
accorded some manuscripts of Vladimir Nabokov, which the New York Public Library’s
Berg Collection put on display last spring. At least two of these, delineated in
colored pencil, were more design than script. One was a diagrammatic analysis of
metrical variations in a poem by Vasily Zhukovsky, structured rather like a
stained-glass window. Units of scansion were represented by variously colored
lozenges, and ruled ligatures ran with and contrary to the rhythms, in triangular
and rectangular patterns.
The value of handwriting here lies precisely in its textual illegibility, which
commutes Nabokov’s notes into wordless geometric patterns. Furthermore, the
awe
commanded by such patterns gestures towards the way in which
handwriting’s opacity intensifies when put on display. Writing is, after all, not
only a textual but also a visual medium, which, according to Neef and van Dijk,
renders it complex as a system based both
on the articulation strategies of alphanumeric text and of visual images. This
visual dimension distinguishes standardized mechanical writing from handwriting,
which is idiosyncratic and often risks being illegible. This specific materiality
qualifies the handwritten text as allographic and autographic at once; its
semiotics unfolds in this in-between-media, as
text-image
or as
image-text.
As Morris’s response to the sight of Reagan’s letter and Nabokov’s manuscripts
demonstrates, the very act of exhibition encourages viewers to interpret handwritten
documents as objects, whose significance is to be discovered by looking at rather
than reading them. Indeed, viewing a handwritten document, existing as it does as
image-text,
becomes even more fraught when it is framed for museum and
library display, where practical challenges contribute further to the manuscript’s
unreadability: when letters are written on both sides of the page, only one side of
the original document can be shown; when manuscripts are bound, only a single opening
of the work can be displayed at a time. Unlike paintings and sculptures, manuscripts
are always displayed under glass, due to their relative fragility, providing another
layer of separation between the viewer and the artifact.spoils the aesthetic pleasure of
viewing the work of art
While increased protection may
be assured by placing a painting behind glass or acrylic, the average artist
often rejects this method for cost as well as for aesthetic reasons. Keep in
mind that a painting whose surface has been carefully protected by varnish will
already possess some defenses against environmental dangers. An exposed canvas
also enhances the viewer’s ability to appreciate the qualities of depth and
texture associated with a painted surface, and the distancing caused by a
glazed surface often bars access to these details
cult value
that he assigned to objects whose significance lay in their
presence rather than their visibility
In recognition of these challenges of display, cultural institutions are increasingly
exhibiting not only handwritten documents but also their digital surrogates.the
centrality of the [original] work of art
museums are not just passive loci of external patterns and processes but self-reflective agents of social and cultural change themselves
celebrate its democratizing potential, its ability to make multiple viewpoints available, to turn visitors into authors, and to engage people in the production of their own stories
I doubt that I would have felt these transformations with the same force had I just tried to read the faded ink on Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, protected behind glass
simply glance at [the original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution] and move on; only a few pause to read a few lines, motivated perhaps by the challenge of deciphering the unfamiliar handwriting. Almost no one takes the time to read the entire texts
forceof the document’s transformation from draft to final version.
By encouraging the visitor to engage with the manuscript beyond its initial visual
effect, the interactive display counteracts handwriting’s opacity to create an
opportunity for the viewer to access the other messages that a document carries. In
the process, the digital representation of the manuscript is made to seem more
transparent to the user than the original manuscript itself by imposing upon the
document yet another mediating layer — the computer screen — which the user
nevertheless perceives as granting unmediated access to its contents.natural user interface
exemplified by the touch-screen
technology many exhibition kiosks employ. According to Eric Horvitz, a scientist
at Microsoft Research, It’s part of
the general trajectory we’re on in the computing industry — this whole notion
of making computers more open to natural human gestures and intentions…The
future’s going to be in fusing together several different natural human
behaviors — how people point, gesture and coordinate with each other…Touch is a
beautiful tip of the iceberg for talking about where things are really
headed
Exhibition designers deliberately encourage this perception. Selma Thomas, for
example, a designer and producer of museum multimedia interactive exhibits, wrote
that [t]he best electronic
programs...present an immediate invitation to participate in an exploration, to
move behind the screen into the seamless reality of another world...The technology
[of a museum program] should be
transparent,
interfering as little as
possible with the experienceprotected behind glass.
Touching the
screen becomes a satisfactory — even superior — surrogate for the visitor’s physical
manipulation of the actual artifact.We logged around 800 hours of unsupervised public use on five workstations
during April this year [2002]…We recorded some 2,250 user sessions. The average
user session was 21 minutes. The average number of museum artifacts looked at
in each session was 18. Over 24,000 searches of the database were made, and
some 66,000 records were displayed on screen in total.
See translate [visitors] into data to be processed,
and Michelle Henning warns that increased numbers do not necessarily correlate
with an improved learning experience
Moreover, although Rothstein privileged an engagement with the intellectual content
behind the document over an emotional reaction to the sight of the artifact, he, too,
employs the language of emotion to describe his interaction with it: I doubt,
he said, that I would have
(my emphasis). Indeed, as viewers’
emotional responses to Reagan’s handwriting were generated not by the sight of the
original letter but rather by a faxed copy of it, so the transformations that
Rothstein felt are triggered by a facsimile of Jefferson’s handwriting. These
experiences, however, appear on the surface to differ in one striking respect:
Rothstein explicitly acknowledged the role of digital technology in bringing the
document to life for him, whereas the fax machine that brought Reagan’s letter to its
viewers vanished from subsequent discourse. Indeed, digital interactive exhibits, far
from eliding their mediating presence, boldly offer added value to the museum-going
experience through touch-screen
kiosks, CD-ROMs, computer games, large-screen installations and videowalls with
multiple images, digital orientation centers,
smart badge
information
systems, 3-D animation, virtual reality, and sophisticated museum web
sitesmusic sheets from a young Duke Ellington, an
early draft of the United States Constitution...are pieces of paper, flat
documents
that require a film
or a video, or an interactive program, to make these paper artifacts come
alive
display of floppies
that,
two decades ago, some believed would never come to pass.
Interactive digital technologies, after all, are often designed to increase users’
access to rare and fragile material while protecting the originals from the stresses
of repeated handling. Due to the extreme brittleness and fragility of the specimens
in Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, for example, Houghton Library restricted virtually
all access to the book shortly after its arrival there in the 1950s, placing it in a
vault where it has remained ever since museums are not about to display the floppies of any
contemporary Flaubert
is as much a claim about the extent to which
artifacts are defined by their physical containers as it is a claim about what makes
artifacts worthy of display. Yet a recent exhibition on the works of Salman Rushdie
at Emory University,
visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel,The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment...It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences by matching which Web sites a writer visited on a particular day with the manuscript he or she was working on at the time.It should be noted that Emory is, at the time of this writing, unique in developing such an extensive emulation of a single collection. While their approach has garnered much admiration, emulation is also expensive and time-consuming, raising barriers to more widespread implementation. See . For more on the benefits and challenges of emulation, see ; .
These materials, handwritten but not in the traditional sense, not only redefine the
relationship between the body of the creator and the body of his work, but also
invite questions about what constitutes a body in the first place. Rushdie himself
described Emory’s archive as my life
with barcodes,
imagining an existence defined and structured by digital
apparatus; at the same time, alluding to a physical body behind the archive, he said
of turning over his papers to Emory that it does feel a bit like undressing in public
warmth
of human thought, effort, and intentionality, and, in the process,
offering new ways of considering what an artifact essentially
In the Middle Ages, the inclusion of a sign of the cross on Edward the Confessor’s seal was an appropriation and reinterpretation of that older handwritten mark of authentication. Now, as we enter the first decades of the twenty-first century, the venerable technology of handwriting as a communicative medium has not yet disappeared. Rather, it has consistently functioned as an important site of cultural complexes about embodied identity, within and against which a growing array of new media continues to situate itself, a process that is bound up with the ways in which a growing array of biotechnologies are prompting continual remediations of the human body. Through these displays of the traces of human hands, then, the multivalent negotiations, frictions, and alliances between technologies and human bodies can come into view.
The Old Version Flickers More: Digital Preservation from the User’s Perspective.
Allowed Me to Write Memoir.