On Reflection: Print in the Digital Age, Where Light Comes to Light

On Reflection: Print in the Digital Age, Where Light Comes to Light* HERBERT GOLDER Adhuc mea messis in herba est. —Aldus Manutius My thesis is straightforward, simple in a way, intuitive, but maybe not obvious. I want to make a case for those old stalwarts, print media and photographic reproduction , in our digital and photonic age, which is moving archaeological discovery exponentially forward, literally at the speed of light. What I want to suggest is the following: When the archaeologist has produced his astonishing new revelations of sketch lines under paint, or of previously undetected painted images on a terracotta statue, or enabled the transcription of hitherto undecipherable inscriptions, or rendered readable what before had been indecipherable traces on a palimpsest, or brought the worn surface detail on a coin into bold relief— through new digital technologies such as polynomial texture mapping, reflectance transformation and laser imaging—a compelling argument can be made that the results of his findings , the images that are the final result of these light-borne and digitally enabled discoveries, are best reproduced—if the objective is to afford an image for careful scrutiny and close, concentrated study by the viewer—in the medium of print, that is, in a high quality photographic reproduction in a bound journal or book as opposed to being digitally rendered on a screen. Let me explore with you a few of the reasons this may be arion 30.1 spring/summer 2021 * A version of this paper was delivered orally at the Digital Imaging in Archaeology Annual Conference of The Institute for Digital Archaeology, at The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies of The University of Oxford, May 31, 2015. 116 on reflection so, stating things that are perhaps patent, but that we simply take for granted. Various studies of brain activity using fMRIs (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and EEGs (Electroencephalograms) have shown that the brain responds differently when viewing something, be it text or image, on a digital screen than on paper. Different parts of the brain are activated by each activity. For reasons that I will try to elucidate , the brain works “harder,” that is, engages more neuronal networks, endeavoring to comprehend the same material on a digital screen than it does on paper. In the final analysis, it is the brain that not only categorizes and cogitates but that actually “sees,” and not the eye. Aristotle was right when he surmised in De Anima that “our minds create images,” that is, make “internal representations of the external world” which we in turn “use for our thought.”1 The photoreceptors on the curved surface of the retina send stimuli to very specialized neuronal networks in the brain. The lateral geniculate nucleus residing in the thalamus, the central connection between the optic nerve and the occipital lobe, compares the two-dimensional images captured on the retinal surfaces of both eyes, assembles the relevant information about shape, space and distance to create 3-d images, and then sends them on to the conscious part of the brain for image recognition and further processing.2 Different neuronal groups activated in response to other stimuli send messages about color, form, movement, language, etc.; and these respective neuronal groups are situated in separate locations in the occipital, parietal , and temporal lobes of the brain, all of which communicate via associational neuronal clusters, a kind of cortical circuitry, with the frontal lobes, which exercise an executive function. In other words, vision, like everything else in the brain, is modular: different signals are sent to different specialized areas, which each perform their separate function. These groupings process signals at different speeds. But each system separately, and then collectively, when working in coordination with the frontal lobes via associational neuronal Herbert Golder 117 clusters, can be said to be working toward a common goal, which is to distill, from the ever-changing information of the visual world, what is important; working that is, in tandem with the part of the brain associated with memory, to represent the permanent, essential character of what it sees—what things are as opposed to how they merely appear from moment to moment.3 In this sense, the brain is...