On the fifth day of Christmas, my husband and I took the A train the length of Manhattan up to one of my favorite spots in New York City — The Cloisters — home of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval Art Collection. Even more than the art, I love the building, a medieval-style cloister built in the 1930s to house the collection, featuring beautiful courtyards and contemplative spaces, blending architectural styles, and in many cases, salvaged sections of buildings from several centuries once located all over Europe. Stain glass windows from Italy shine light on an altar from Spain in a room where the wall sconces display icons from Germany. Then you walk through an archway into an indoor courtyard supported by columns brought from the courtyards of ten other cloisters, now long gone.
Although I was on vacation, I couldn’t help but see the Cloisters as a metaphor for digital humanities. We are digital architects, creating new spaces to display the glorious works of the past and structuring the fragments to see new patterns in disparate sources. If we do our jobs right, the digital edifices should enhance not detract from the sources we seek to analyze and share. The framework of each project is tailored to the subject matter often with special nooks for contemplation and introspection.
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