Manifold Of Greatness: An Exhibit Review

For this blog post I will be doing a review of the online exhibit Manifold of Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible.

To begin, the project Manifold Greatness was undertaken for the 400^th anniversary of the 1611 King James Bible. It was jointly produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library and the Harry Ransom Center. This project was made possible with the National Endowment for the Humanities: Because democracy demands wisdom grant. The online exhibit has also won the 2012 RBMS Leab Exhibition Award in the “electronic exhibition” category.

The exhibit is divided into three sections: “Before”, “Making”, and “Later”. This allows for chronological organization without becoming too clunky. The site is visually appealing and easy to navigate through the use of tabs. The site makes use of a variety of mediums and creatively uses them to present their collection. Some of these media are videos, timelines, audio recordings, genealogical charts and collection galleries.

There are a handful of videos throughout the exhibit. They provide further information on the King James Bible or on the development of the exhibit itself. A feature of these videos is the inclusion of  a “Transcript” button. The inclusion of a transcript of the video is important because it provides access to a wider audience who may not be able to view the video.

A critique of the design of the exhibit would be the lack of a “Zoom In” option in the Gallery sections. In the gallery sections the user is able to look at the collection in slideshow format, where they can remain on the current page or enter a full screen mode. While the full screen mode does enlarge the document a bit, there is no feature to get a closer view. This is different from the “Read the Book” section which allows the user to read excerpts from the King James Bible. This section gives the audience the option to zoom in on the pages, allowing for a more detailed exploration of the artifact. I would suggest that the exhibit apply the same function to the rest of their gallery so that users can more closely examine the collection.

The section of the exhibit that I find most interesting is the “Compare Translations” segment. This section of the exhibit allows the user to compare passages from the King James Bible with the same passage form earlier English Bibles. This illuminates decisions that the translators made while transcribing the King James Bible. A handful of chosen verses are put side by side, and an analysis of the differences is provided. I like this section because the creators of the exhibit are not just  making the collection available to the public online, but they are also taking the time to interpret the collection and explain their findings to their audience.

Another section  of note is the “Handel’s Messiah" section. Composed in 1741 George Frideric Handel created “Messiah”, which was shaped by the King James Bible. The exhibit highlights the importance of the King James Bible to Handel’s composition by playing an audio recording of Handel’s work, while highlighting where from the King James Bible this music was inspired from.

Overall this exhibit is well laid out, visually appealing, easy to navigate, makes use of a variety of mediums, and presents the collection in an interesting way. In one of the videos, English Fellow Helen Moore states, “we decided to attempt to celebrate the King James bible, whilst at the same time, bringing to a new audience a knowledge of the processes that went into its making”. I believe Moore achieved this goal by presenting the collection in a creative and accessible way that reaches out to new audiences.