Electronic Scriptorium

Description

Nathan Schneider:

"still remember the excitement with which my friend Brother Benedict Simmonds, a Trappist monk at Holy Cross Abbey in Virginia, told me about the Electronic Scriptorium a decade and a half ago. It was a business model he’d helped to develop that would employ contemplative nuns and monks in digitization tasks—of library files, for instance—mirroring the ancient monastic work of hand-copying manuscripts. Wired and CNN ran profiles of it in the 1990s. Communities around the country joined in. But Br. Benedict’s fellow monks at Holy Cross ended up deciding that sitting at computers all day wasn’t the right fit for their calling. They doubled down on baking fruitcakes." (http://americamagazine.org/content/all-things/slow-computing)