It’s always worth listening to Cliff Lynch’s opening talks at the CNI task force meetings, and this week’s meeting in Washington was no exception. (My apologies for not blogging the meeting; busy week.) Like no one else, Cliff has his finger on the pulse of all that is new and important in the world of the digital humanities. Although Cliff discussed some issues that have received a lot of press, such as net neutrality, I found one issue he raised totally unexpected and fascinating.

Cliff noted that digital surrogates for museum objects—that is, digital photographs or 2- or 3-D scans—are becoming so good that for most scholarly and classroom purposes they can replace the originals. For many years, one of the main arguments museums have used to avoid the repatriation of foreign materials—e.g., sculpture or pottery taken during colonization or war—is that they worried about the accessibility and condition of an object if they returned it. Scholars might lose important evidence, museums argued, and researchers often needed to look at the original object for small details like texture or paint color. With advances in digitization, however, this objection no longer holds water, and museums should feel more pressure (or more freedom) to repatriate controversial items in their collections.

[Creative Commons licensed photo of the Elgin Marbles courtesy of zakgallop on Flickr.]

Thanks to the hard work of my colleagues at the Center for History and New Media, led by Sharon Leon, you can now go behind the scenes with the curators of the National Museum of American History. This month the discussion begins with the famous Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter and the origins of the Civil Rights movement. Each month will highlight a new object and its corresponding context, delivered in rich multimedia and with the opportunity to chat with the curators themselves.