ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some problems in imagination and empiricism when digital photography forms the fundamental evidential basis for the scholarly examination of art-historical artifacts. The deep idealism of a commitment to photography as a form of objective representation of real objects, necessary to all those scholarly disciplines founded on using photographs to make historical arguments and to defend them evidentially through the images supplied in a publication, is in profound conflict with the ways digital data functions (and the scholarly community’s relative collective inexperience in understanding these ways). The focus of my discussion is on a riveting new discovery of a unique and controversial decorated papyrus from the first century BC (or AD?).
