The Guardian view on digitising culture: make manuscripts more illuminating

We live in an age of instant images and memes, when 10,000 copies of a picture can be flung around the world in seconds by sliding a finger half an inch across a phone screen. This would have been unbelievable 20 years ago and impossible even to imagine 20 years before that. Go back 1,000 years, and it would have been sorcery. But it is in the world of hand-copied manuscripts 1,000 years old or more that the digital revolution has had some of its most profound and unambiguously beneficial effects. More...