Premium
Curatorial Authority in Digital Scholarship: A Review of Materializing the Bible
Author(s) -
Mohan Urmila,
O'DellChaib Courtney
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.13145
Subject(s) - scholarship , citation , library science , digital library , digital scholarship , history , media studies , sociology , art , law , computer science , political science , literature , poetry
T essay reviews the website Materializing the Bible (MTB), a digital scholarship project curating Bible-based attractions throughout the world (www. materializingthebible.com). Anthropologist James Bielo, the website’s founder and chief curator, notes, “This project begins with the premise that ‘the Bible’ as a cultural category is not reducible to a printed text that people read, interpret, memorize, and discursively circulate. ‘The Bible’ has historically been performed through a wide range of experiential registers: from stained glass and other artistic media to film, video games, and toy objects” (Bielo 2018b, 298). As part of the study of “material religion” (Meyer et al. 2010) and the multimodal turn in anthropology (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017), we welcome this opportunity to write this review and dialogue with the curators of MTB (James Bielo, Amanda White, Claire Vaughn, and Kaila Sansom). This is an exciting time for anthropologists of religion because digital projects are being created on various aspects of the discipline (Bielo 2018a). Our review explores Bielo’s (2018b, 2018c) idea of “immersion” and its limits in MTB by questioning the categories of the “material” and “bodily” from the perspective of praxis and affect (Mohan and Warnier 2017; O’Dell-Chaib 2017). (The latter concerns also motivate the Material Religions blog, materialreligions.blogspot.com, and a corresponding Facebook group that we currently coedit.) While technological solutions are needed to draw viewers/readers into digital scholarship, technology cannot replace the role of curatorial authority and theoretical commitment. For our initial assessment of MTB, we consulted graphic designer Kate DeWitt to understand how the flat world of the screen could be animated through various digital tools. These include using large images and incorporating video at the top of the screen, using the act of scrolling to animate an image that draws the viewer into the topography they are describing, and employing designs that combine more conventional scrolling text with augmented-reality sections. However, such tools must also serve conceptual imperatives. Immersion, in our understanding of James Bielo’s work, is the paradigm by which American Christian groups use sensory and material means