Conclusion

The history of sampler making is riddled with new media encounters. The idea of woven (ie. textile) objects are at the root of the word text. Through sampler verse and signature, text was introduced to textiles. Traditions of  “old world” sampler making were both continued and transformed when brought to the “New World”. The ideas behind sampler verse were taken from religious texts and common phrases and through the act of stitching were turned into texts of self-creation for the sampler-maker. The Sampler Archive, and digital museum collections introduce samplers to a digital format. In Imagining the New Media Encounter, Allan Liu writes that “the trick” to telling good stories of new media encounters “is to play the “old” and “new,” “codex” and “digital,” and “literary” and “informational” off each other in ways that thwart any facile modernization narrative and foster surprising recognitions about the scholarly and cultural potential of new media” (5).  The story of sampler making is certainly not linear nor does it follow a path of modernization. “Text” and “textile” play off each other throughout sampler history. Are samplers textiles that feature texts? Are they texts written on textiles? Samplers are seen in large part as art objects by the academic world. Efforts to digitize samplers make them into images on a screen. Does this make it more or less likely that they will be viewed as texts? Does this process ‘reduce’ them to an image of an image? Or does seeing a digitized manuscript and a digitized sampler side by side allow the viewer to perceive them both as texts?  None of these questions have answers; all answers are true. 

In the article “What do Pictures “Really” Want?” W.J.T Mitchell invites the reader to engage in the slightly bizarre concept of asking what a picture desires. The understanding is that objects can desire something separate from what their creator desires. But in the case of a sampler, the maker seems to have necessarily embedded her own desires into the desires of the sampler. She has given the sampler the words to express itself and it says, “remember me”. Perhaps then, digitization is what the sampler wants. It wants to be remediated and transformed so that both it and its creator can maintain their place in cultural memory.