Interpreting Digital Images Beyond Just the Visual: Crossmodal Practices in Medieval Musicology

Abstract We argue that high-resolution naturalistic digital images of physical objects are oriented to in a very different manner than other visual representations such as ‘inscriptions’ which are manufactured by black-box devices in order to transform phenomena into diagrams, or ‘rendering practices’ where scientists visually transform the meaning of objects and events using representational techniques to select information and simplify its presentation. We show that medieval music scholars engage with high-resolution images of physical objects through crossmodal practices relying upon the interconnected senses to examine a variety of properties held within physical objects when they are displayed within digital images.