Don’t scratch your name in the wall OF COURSE! – But, what do we take away with us from a visit to a museum? postcards, a book and a “selfie”.  Why does this matter to a house museum site? Because what I consider important may not be the same for you. We have to allow a visitor to “FINGERPRINT” their visit in all kinds of ways.    In this case, the “selfie” played a major role in the engagement of the site and artifacts. Allowing humor is another factor in “fingerprinting”.  Just because we are making faces in our “selfie”, doesn’t mean that we are not appreciating the Snake-Dragon, Symbol of Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, Panel from the Ishtar Gate (604-562 BC), Babylon, Detroit Institute of Art, 2011

In some cases, “fingerprinting” may be the desire to sit quietly in a space – as  here in the Jefferson designed – University…

Written by hand, medieval manuscripts are very different from printed books, which started to appear after Gutenberg’s mid-fifteenth-century invention of moving type. One difference in particular is important for our understanding of manuscripts. While printed books were produced in batches of a thousand or more, handwritten copies were made one at the time. In fact, medieval books, especially those made commercially, came to be after a detailed conversation between scribe and reader, a talk that covered all aspects of the manuscript’s production. This is the only way the scribe could ensure the expensive product he was about to make was in sync with what the reader wanted. Consequently, while printed books were shaped generically and according to the printer’s perception of what the (anonymous) “market” preferred, the medieval scribe designed a book according to the explicit instructions  of its user.

This principle of one-on-one (of scribe-reader and reader-manuscript) explains why we come across some very strange…