Digital Twins

Concepts & Methods Unit 6

At a time when the practices of handwriting and production of handwritten artefacts are seemingly losing their long-unquestioned role at the heart of human practices of transmission of knowledge, scholars are turning to the study of these same practices. Paradoxically, we do this increasingly by means of digital reproductions and other digital tools. CMU 6 will reflect and conceptualise how the increasing availability of different digital reproduction techniques and their products – ‘digital twins’ of WAs – has shaped, and is continuing to shape, how we conduct research in the digital age.

We employ the term ‘digital twin’, a term first established in engineering, at the centre of a cross-disciplinary discourse about digital reproductions as epistemic tools. We will ask how they are produced, made available and used and will explore the ways they can, and cannot, substitute for research on and with the originals.

The CMU’s work centres around three axes: 1) How digitisation affects what objects are visible and available to scholars; 2) We will consider digital reproductions as part of a longer history of using ‘twins’ of WAs in research, including, for instance, engraving, photography, microfilming, xerox-copying, squeezes, rubbings; 3) CMU 6 will systematically reflect on how our encounter with digital twins has refashioned our perception of the actual material objects. While digital images pretend to be authentic impressions of the artefacts, they are themselves often carefully constructed and optimised digital files.