Discovery and Democracy: The Role of the Digital Image in the Transformation of the Cultural Heritage Landscape
As part of its Summer 2020 Small Talk Series, the Council of the Friends of the Princeton University Library invites you to an online event with William Noel, Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, who will discuss the role of the digital image in the transformation of the cultural heritage landscape.
The digital image is not a surrogate for the original book. It is a primary resource in its own right, responsive to questions, subject to powerful manipulations, and open to deployment in contexts of which the physical book could only dream – if only it could think. The digital image also opens the world of rare books to an audience of millions.
In this talk, Noel will discuss some of the potential of the digital image to transform the world of cultural heritage. He will also reassure that unique and material aspects of rare books will always remain at the heart of any Special Collections endeavor.
- Date:
- Sunday, July 12, 2020
- Time:
- 3:00pm - 4:00pm
- Audience:
- Independent Scholar / Outside Researcher Member of the Public Princeton Alumni Princeton Faculty/Researcher Princeton Staff Princeton Student
- Categories:
- Events
William Noel is the John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University. He is also Chair of the Philadelphia Consortium of Special Collections Libraries. Until February of 2020, he was Associate Vice Provost for Strategic Partnerships, Director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at The University of Pennsylvania. Before that he was Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, a position he took up in 1997. He received his Ph.D in 1993 from Cambridge University, where he studied at Downing College as an undergraduate, postgraduate, and British Academy Post Doctoral Research Fellow. Will is the author and co-editor of several books, including The Harley Psalter, Cambridge University Press 1995, and The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David, London, 1996. Will directed an international program to conserve, image and study the Archimedes Palimpsest, the unique source for three treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician. A popular account of the project “The Archimedes Codex’, which he co-wrote with Reviel Netz in 2007, won the Neumann Prize in 2014, and was published in 27 languages. Will has helped to orchestrate many grant-funded digital initiatives, including the digitization of the illuminated manuscripts of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and the medieval manuscripts in Philadelphia’s Special Collections Libraries. He is an advocate for good quality collections of open data, and in 2013 he was honored as a White House Open Science Champion of Change. He is on the Faculty of Rare Book School, University of Virginia, and he is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania. He is a TED Speaker, where his talk has been viewed over a million times. Will lives in Philadelphia, with his wife Lynn – who is also a medievalist, and their son Henry, nearly nine, who most definitely isn’t.