The latest Chronicle of Higher Education (January 9, 2009) includes a brief article (sub’n req’d) about an English professor and his biologist brother, who together are developing a way to use DNA to determine the local origins of medieval manuscripts.
While in Europe researching the origins of a poem, Timothy L. Stinson, an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, became frustrated with the limited methods available for determining where the original text came from and when it was produced.
“And then there was sort of this light bulb,” Mr. Stinson recalled. “Wait a minute, they’re on animal skin. Why can’t we look at DNA?”
Indeed, in the age before paper was widely available and affordable, the written word was recorded on the hides of sheep, goats, and cattle. Shortly after Mr. Stinson had his epiphany, he began putting his idea into practice. Working with his brother, a biologist who has performed DNA extraction and analysis, Mr. Stinson is developing a method of using DNA to determine when and where medieval manuscripts were written. The approach will significantly improve the accuracy of the standard identification process, which typically relies on analysis of the author’s handwriting and dialect — approaches that are “notoriously unreliable,” Mr. Stinson says.
Here is where the disciplines of art and science (and history and sociology…) perfectly complement one another. There is some precedent for this partnership. In the mid-’80s, Paul Needham, currently rare books librarian at Princeton, but then at the Pierpont Morgan Library, worked with physicists at (if memory serves me well) UC Davis to conduct cyclotron analysis of the ink used by Gutenberg in the production of his Bible. Their work (see the articles cited at the end of the the foregoing link) produced fascinating conjectures about the details of work in Gutenberg’s atelier, tied to findings about the physical substance comprising his books.
But before Needham, there was Allan Stevenson. I read Stevenson’s monumental Problem of the Missale Speciale (London: Bibliographical Society, 1967) in one sitting at UCLA’s library school shortly after the Needham cyclotron articles appeared. Obviously, Stevenson worked with cruder technology than Needham and Stinson: a microscope, photography, his unaided vision, the historical tools of papermaking. Watermarks are formed by wires shaped and anchored to the wire mesh of a papermold, the bed on which paper was made. Naturally, the shaped wires began to lose their shape as more paper was produced on the mold. Observing the gradual deformation of watermarks in the paper used to print the eponymous missal, Stevenson, like Needham, was able to suggest how the work proceeded from copy to copy.
“And then there was sort of this light bulb…” Perhaps it’s not at all ironic for Stinson to resort to a not quite antiquated figure to reflect the moment of his discovery.
Accidental Blogger 
7 responses to “Text, Book, Matter (Dean)”
Thank you Dean. Glad to see that you do find areas where science aids to fulfill curiosity about art, history and sociology. You are of course aware of my own more liberal and optimistic views of what science can or cannot (should not?) try to achieve in other realms of knowledge and pursuit. Rather than wax eloquent ad nauseum on my oft repeated opinions, I am copying below something Brian Leiter wrote a while ago when he took apart the insufferable self appointed pundit of all things, Leon Wieseltier.
I agree wholeheartedly. But then I agree with Leiter on many things.
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I’m inclined to agree, too, but with caution. Two issues with the post you have excerpted particularly trouble me. Clearly, characterizing as superstition “the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical” is hyperbole and, as Leiter laments at the outset of his post, bad journalism, typical of the New York Times. (However, if Wieseltier is, as Leiter points out, a literary editor, one might expect him to resort to literary strategies, however badly executed.) But I read an implicit qualification in the quoted phrase, namely, that science can explain only phenomena amenable to scientific explanation. I admit this appears merely circular, but I mean it to point out the obvious fact that science chooses its problems. The notion that science may one day explain everything fails to specify what comprises everything.
My second concern is with portions of Leiter’s post you’ve not included. Leiter’s writing—in his blog posts, but also in his scholarship—is famously straightforward, a feature many of his readers, myself among them, especially enjoy. Thus, for example, Wieseltier’s review is “the sneering of the ignorant.” Readers will have no trouble eliciting a thesis here. It’s also clear that Wieseltier’s purpose in his review is to take swipes at Dennett. For example, “In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero.” Leiter is well aware of this motive when he remarks that Wieseltier is interested in attacking the “rhetorical and psychological” goals he ascribes to Dennett. In the end, the review may be misguided, overwrought, confused as to the science informing Dennett’s project…but if the rhetorical and psychological strategies of Dennett’s writing invite criticism, it’s no condemnation to accuse the reviewer of addressing them.
I find little to appreciate in Wieseltier’s review. For me, it’s another instance of NYT critical vacuity, another reason not to regret having given up regular reading of the Sunday review. But I think I understand—as does Leiter—that the reviewer is treating a text about science as something of a literary text, and that’s his prerogative. The same goes for Dennett, the subtitle of whose book, after all, is “Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.”
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Of course, a reviewer/ critic, literary or otherwise, has no obligation to be “nice” to his subject matter. I picked the one paragraph from Leiter’s rebuttal to Wieseltier which very pithily addresses what science may some day plausibly be able to explain. He (nor Dennett, as far as I know) doesn’t claim that it will definitely clarify the nature of “everything” but leaves open the possibility that it might. We will never know unless we try, will we?
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What a cool project Dean! This is indeed one of those unusual cases where technology can be an aid to humanistic scholarship, rather than a hindrance (in the form of distractions like cell phones, television, the web, etc). I’m very much of the same party as Anna’s old teacher Ian Ayres, who deliberately disconnects his Internet when he wants to get some real work done: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/surfing-the-class/
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Andrew, here is a piece of JFKesque advice:
“Do ask what science can do for you. But make up your own mind on what you want to do with science.”
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I hope that science never explains everything, or we will have reduced our vision to a narrow telescope, a net loss, in my opinion.
I’m not sure it entails bragging rights,but not only was I in Ayres class, but my class was the source material for his original 2001 Op Ed on ungrateful, entitled, web-surfing students. Since I generally preferred notebooks for note taking (but was and am an inveterate doodler), I never had a horse in the race on that debate, but remember thinking it all a little overblown, on both sides.
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Timely comments from Andrew and Anna–although I am now about to detour far from the territory of the original post–as I was speaking with a friend at coffee this morning about the matter of laptops in the classroom. And just last night I attended a law school welcome of sorts for new instructors, one of whom was curious to learn our “policy.” (Of course, there is no policy. Professors make the rules for themselves.) Like Ayres, this instructor was eager to ban them, and other instructors indicated they’ve done so successfully. Coincidentally, prior to attending the event I had just read a blog post about a relatively new report presenting conclusions that might prompt Ayres et al. to reconsider their positions. Thus, “Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found….”
I am surprised at the vast chasm of misunderstanding separating even fairly young professors and their students. Believe me, as a student I myself was burdened by the “negative externalities” in classroom laptop play. For that matter, the very chorus of note-taking crickets almost daily pissed me off. But clearly my responsibility was to deal with it, as it is the professor’s. Ayres is flat-out wrong and, of course, paternalistic.
In the golden age of pens and pencils, we doodled and passed notes, even to the distraction of our adjacent class mates. The tantalizing aura of technology has otherwise sensible people like Ayres rapt in its thrall, imagining an phenomenological difference where there is none. Par for the course for Ayres, he wants to measure it. Isn’t it hilarious that he considers inviting his already distracted students to participate in a project “to collect data on how much surfing is actually going on”? I propose a hypothesis that the amount of surfing is equivalent to the amount of distracted doodling of twenty years ago. If that’s the case, then now, as then, a “solution” would be to assure that the substance and demands of the class are as engaging as humanly possible.
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