At least according to a recent Pew poll.

GOP Seen as Principled, But Out of Touch and Too Extreme | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: At a time when the Republican Party’s image is at a historic low, 62% of the public says the GOP is out of touch with the American people, 56% think it is not open to change and 52% say the party is too extreme.

Those are some pretty damning numbers. Here’s a fuller breakdown:

This may mean good news in the short term for the Democratic Party, but I think this is ultimately a bad thing for our country. In a two-party system, we need two legitimate options to work as a sort of balance. This is becoming less likely as both parties are becoming further and further apart from one another. The Tea Party and the Republican Party have succeeded in shifting the entire conversation to the right so that what is “liberal” now would have been a quite moderate (and in some cases conservative) position 20 years ago. This is not the direction I personally want the country to go and I think the woeful image of the Republican Party may help this in the short term. Nevertheless, I still think that a thriving two-party democracy actually needs two parties.

It should go without saying that the Republican Party has brought much of this on themselves over the past 4 years by being “the party of No,” refusing ideas that were originally theirs simply because they are being suggested by President Obama, and allowing vocal members of their party to express nostalgia for 19th century views on non-white, non-male citizens. Yet many fail to see this correlation.

Leonardo’s Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory | The Atlantic: The British Library has been digitizing some of its prize pieces and they announced a new round of six artifacts had been completed including Beowulf, a gold-ink penned Gospel, and one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.

I continue to be fascinated by how far technology has brought us with regard to manuscript access. The fact that I can access thousands of ancient manuscripts that are housed in hundreds of museums and libraries around the world while sitting in my apartment in Tallahassee, FL is amazing. The digitization of manuscripts has the ability to revolutionize many fields and areas of research, making intense manuscript study possible for more and more people.

There was, however, another note by the author of this story in The Atlantic that resonated with me:

But there is a fundamental inscrutability to these texts to the untrained eye. Not only is the language unfamiliar, and the script, in Leonardo’s case, a simple code, but without the context of the times, it’s hard to make heads or tails of them, aside from aesthetic appreciation.

Of course, I’m happy such objects exist in more accessible, digital formats, but what the primary documents remind me is how important the interpreters of these works are. The raw documents do not make sense without the added layer of analysis that comes from the scholars who study these works.

Perhaps we can read this as a kind of parable for opening up data and archives. The digitization of key historical artifacts does not replace historians so much as make their work more visible to different audiences. The necessity of what they do is made plain.

Every little bit of validation that I can get for the work I do is nice and it seems that the digitization of manuscripts has done just what this author suggested – made others aware of just how necessary historians and specialists are. For any member of the “generally educated public” can access Leonardo’s notebooks or any of the thousands of New Testament manuscripts, but most of them will only ever be able to appreciate the documents on aesthetic grounds. I’m grateful to the historians, scholars, and specialists that have opened up so much history to me and hope that one day I can help history come alive for others as well.

Thanks to Sam for the link.