by Jon Lackman | 5 November 2009 | Islamic
From The Baltimore Sun:
In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System … It’s painstaking work, photographing one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in North America, and slow. But scholars say the two-year project has put the Baltimore museum at the vanguard of a movement that is transforming the study of ancient texts. Working with a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters is placing its entire collection of Qurans and other Islamic pieces online, where high-resolution images of the roughly 230 often richly illuminated or illustrated pieces may be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection …
“It’s very important to remember that Islamic art is a very nascent field,” [Walters curator Amy Landau] says. “It’s not like Renaissance art history that’s very well developed. We’re just really beginning. People are now trained in the languages. There’s more material documented. So there’s still so much more to do in the field, and it’s digitization projects such as this that make that possible. It’s going to be a huge push forward.” Persis Berlekamp, an art historian at the University of Chicago, says the still-nascent movement has transformed the field. As recently as the early 2000s, when she was pursuing her doctorate at Harvard, research could be a hit-or-miss affair, involving expensive and time-consuming travel that might not yield useful results.
