Here the focus is on historians, but I think archive photography will fundamentally change the study of literature. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in my own research...
There are many manuscript sources that cast light on how and why writers write, but they often don’t lend themselves to transcription. For instance, imagine trying to record the revisions to this translation from Persian (Georg Gentius - Rosarium politicum, 1651) in a notebook. 
It’s not easy, and, in general, it’s difficult to distinguish relevant from irrelevant detail. Maybe an unnoticed subtlety in ink or word placement is the key to distinguishing between, say, stages of revision.
Also, the manuscript is full of clues that link it to other objects from the world of the author and tell us something new about the work of literature, but which require digital photography to reliably decipher.
For instance, the manuscript I just showed, now in the Leipzig University Library, is the printer’s manuscript for a Latin translation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān by Georg Gentius, the first complete translation of the work by an orientalist.
It’s an important window onto how the first generations of modern orientalist scholars worked, but the last major work on Gentius was written in 1733, and there’s much about him that remains a mystery. Still, the Leipzig manuscript does give us a few hints.
First, if we look at the Persian text, we find marginalia written, not in Persian, but Turkish. These come from the Gulistān commentary of Aḥmed Sūdī. Here, Gentius copied out Sūdī’s gloss on a confusing term (برد عجوز) whose Latin equivalent Gentius first left blank.
It’s helps to have a camera to catch these things, but admittedly you don’t need one to make this connection. Not so with the manuscript’s second clue: Gentius’s handwriting.
Gentius, who lived for years in Istanbul, could write rather well in Arabic script, but his hand is still distinctive. This is important because Gentius copied and annotated a number of Turkish and Persian mss, although he never signed them and avoided using Latin script.
We can identify these mss by comparing them with his hand in the printer’s manuscript. It turns out that Gentius copied the entirety of Sūdī’s Gulistān commentary by hand. One volume is in Copenhagen’s Royal Library and one volume in Leipzig (B. or. 365) islamic-manuscripts.net/receive/IslamH…
These manuscripts offer their own clues. In particular, another, clearly Ottoman hand appears here and there in both Copenhagen and Leipzig manuscripts. Gentius seems to have studied the work in the presence of an Ottoman scholar. (here, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig B. or. 365)
And so on. There’s some information in G’s letters on who this might be, and I’m sure that we’ll eventually find his teacher’s handwriting in another ms (some irregularities in the mss copied by Gentius might also make it possible to identify the exact ms he copied).
The point is: cameras make the world one big reading room, and you can haul out manuscripts from anywhere and compare them, and do forms of research earlier only possible in exceptional or particularly comprehensive collections.
And this gives new perspective on old works. Here, Gentius’s translation links Ottoman and orientalist philology, and show that he studied the Gulistān with an Ottoman scholar, reading Ottoman commentaries (which he also borrowed from to pen the notes in his printed edition)
In fact, if you look at the manuscripts of other EM orientalists, they show this is typical: orientalists before the mid 18th century almost always read Persian literature with the help of Ottoman ms sources (my article on this will be in a forthcoming special issue of Lias)
and I’d argue this is true more generally: orientalist literature emerged on the periphery of Ottoman philology. Often obscured in print, a shared tradition comes to light in the archive...
and shows how the world can look very different when you are running around photographing manuscripts (and have the help of understanding and knowledgeable librarians).
This kind of work is qualitatively different than photographing for transcription, which is, in a sense, a time saver that alters the location of scholarly labor. Reconstructing the genesis of a work, comparing handwriting, analyzing marginalia...
are in many cases only made possible through the use of facsimiles. Photos also let us show the object to our reader. Today, these methods are employed more by intellectual historians than scholars of literature, but I think that’s a matter of training and opportunity.
It’s telling that in literary studies and my discipline (German), “philology” is often used as if it were synonymous with “close reading” (following, as far as I can tell, a somewhat maddening essay on the “Return to Philology” by Paul de Man).
But digital photography facilitates the specialized skills historically associated with that term, and lets scholars connect the dots across collections for a very different view of the history of literature, rooted in the history of writing and reading.
I‘m sure it varies by discipline, and from place to place, but I haven’t noticed much reflection on this in literary studies, at least among non-medievalists (though it’s very possible I just missed it), or seen departments do anything to prepare students, even with the growing..
availability of digitized material and the exceptional work being done that considers literature in its rich material contexts. Is it crazy to think dig. photography and the promise of new research are loosening the hold of the text as our object of study?
And that this will require new forms of training? Perhaps I’m just being hopeful; I’ll leave it there. Incidentally, all the best advice on scholarly data management I received came from art historians. /end
