As a textile historian, my research often places me in the room with the objects I study. The tactile experience of seeing and handling the art teaches me not only how a cloth was made, but why its artist(s) chose to create it with a particular material or design. So when I approached this week’s readings, all about the digitization of art, images, and text descriptions, it is fair to say I felt out of my element. It’s one thing to analyze the art object through the screen, another to analyze the affect of the screen itself! But reflecting on my practice with digitization tools and how they pushed me to think beyond the material aspects of experiencing art, I’m inspired to understand the visualization of textiles using both a physical and digital space.
In “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Evaluating and Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource,” author Emma Stanford makes the case that the reproduction of art through images needs to be investigated for both its benefits and limitations to object interpretation in the digital age. She sees the danger of digital images to be their limitless reach and reproduction, and proposes historians combat this by writing metadata for images and having said data by accessible to the public. In her words, this solution tackles the root of the problem with the “digital surrogacy” of online images, which is that, “there are no bad digital surrogates— only misleading and poorly described ones (Stanford 2020, 2010).” This sentiment came up in another context this week, as I was preparing for my lesson plan on the history of photography, in which my class and I were discussing how we interpret photographs versus paintings. Similar to the opening of Stanford’s essay, the focus of our class was on the innovations of William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype and his subsequent book The Pencil of Nature. To illustrate the pervasiveness of facsimiles today, which Talbot himself predicted, I had the students scroll through their social media and consider what images they saw, for what reasons, and the quantity of images that appeared on their screen. As we discussed the exercise, an observation was made that many images posted by influencers, companies, and even real-life friends were composed to look candid, when they were actually staged for the photo, and then curated to share. In other words, their presentation does not tell a full story. Interpreting Stanford’s concern for digital facsimiles with this conversation prompted me to think about the contemporary state of digital collections, where the viewing experience with an object is up to the quality and number of photos uploaded to a database.
What is included, omitted, or particular to digital collections, edited from the final photo will not invoke the same looking experience one would have seeing the physical object up-close. I can attest to this fact, as there have been many textiles I needed to see up-close before determining their aesthetic and/or material qualities. Take for example, this gara cloth (a wax-resist textile made in Sierra Leone) that I had the opportunity to see in-person at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Before viewing the work, I did not have many thoughts on it, beyond that it used a resist-dye technique I wanted to see for a research project.
On the left: Photo of gara cloth taken in the North Carolina Museum of Art’s collection by me, June 26, 2026.
On the right: “Wax-stamped resist-dyed Textile (gara),” early 1970s. Synthetic, indigo, and kola nut dyes with various resist techniques, on damask cotton cloth. North Carolina Museum of Art, 2020.9.3. Photograph taken from their collections website.
But upon seeing this textile in person I was drawn into its beauty. Until I viewed it in-person, I didn’t realize the damask (satin-weave) cotton which backgrounds the indigo pattern has a gridded, reflective surface. This one layer added a dimensionality to the cloth I would have never seen in the digital image. Even this image doesn’t do it justice! Moving around the room I was in, I realized it was this experience, moving with and looking closely at the textile in the light, which was integral to understanding its value as clothing. It is one thing to say that it has a gridded pattern which switches between horizontal stripes and flowers, and another to say that its satin sheen backing would have complimented the dyed pattern, flattering the wearer’s body and valuing this textile as a quality cloth. While the first description is not deceitful, or entirely inaccurate, it does not draw the viewer into the full experience of looking at and wearing a textile such as this one. So how do we reconcile our dependence on digital images with the absence of material objects?
Last week, when I was practicing with digitization tools for alt text and other ADA accessibility tools, I connected the interpretations of visual language they provide with the need for clarity and alternative modes of seeing with digital images. It is precisely because digital tools can’t stand in for material objects that they are an integral part of viewing art. Before this week, I thought of alt text was a tool used by and for visually impaired people only. But exploration of how it is written made me consider how visual language goes beyond just what you see in the moment. It also considers the details others can experience only through words. By reflecting on how we write about the art we observe, alt text is no longer a simple tool, but also an alternative method for collecting data. This data may help us put our own ways of seeing into a larger context.
Note: alt-text and digital images will be added to this post in a future update.