Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Page 19

  8. Archer Taylor, The Literary Riddle before 1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948); Tomas Tomasek, Das deutsche Rätsel im Mittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994); and Bruno Roy, Devinettes françaises du moyen âge (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1977).

  9. André Jolles, Einfache Formen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), 135.

  10. Anthony Bonner, ed., Selected Works of Ramon Llull, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 579. For a discussion of the history of such algorithmic devices, see David Link, “Scrambling T-R-U-T-H: Rotating Letters as a Material Form of Thought,” Variantology 4 (2010): 215–66.

  11. Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae, oder, Mathematische und Philosophische Erquickstunden (Nuremberg: Dümler, 1651). For an excellent discussion of Harsdörffer’s ring, see Whitney Trettien, “Computers, Cut-Ups, and Combinatory Volvelles: An Archaelogy of Text-Generating Mechanisms,” http://whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/.

  12. Henry Carrington Bolton, The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children: Their Antiquity, Origin and Wide Distribution (New York: D. Appleton, 1888).

  13. Dawn Addes, ed., The Dada Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), 119.

  14. Dawn Addes, The Dada Reader, 37.

  15. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936),” in The Essential Turing, ed. B. Jack Copeland (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 75.

  16. David Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World (New York: Harcourt, 2000), xvi.

  17. For a critique of our overreliance on Google search, see Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).

  18. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Playable Media and Textual Instruments,” Dich-tung Digital 1 (2005): http://dichtung-digital.org/2005/1/Wardrip-Fruin/, and Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). For a regularly updated review of new algorithmically driven authoring programs, see Judy Malloy, ed., Application Software for Electronic Literature and New Media: http://www.narrabase.net/.

  19. J. W. Goethe, Torquato Tasso, in Plays, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Continuum, 1993), 241.

  20. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 2000), 131.

  21. Apostrophe, compiled by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler (Toronto: ECW Press, 2006).

  22. As Cayley writes, “My intention has been, in part, to interrogate certain relationships between the granular or atomic structures of alphabetically transcribed language and the critically or interpretatively discoverable rhetorical and aesthetic effects of literature.” John Cayley, “Overboard: An Example of Time-Based Poetics in Digital Art,” Dichtung Digital 32, no. 2 (2004): http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm.

  23. For a review, see Michele White, “The Aesthetic of Failure,” in The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 85–114.

  24. Digital humanities is a capacious term that encompasses a number of practices including the creation of multimedia archives, open-source publishing, virtual research environments, geographic mapping of cultural material, and the quantitative analysis of music, images, and text. My discussion here will be limited to how quantitative analysis impacts the way we read. For an introduction to the field, see Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 55–61, and Susan Schreibman, Raymond George Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).

  25. Tanya Clement, “‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: Using Digital Tools to Distant-Read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 3 (2008): 361–81. FeatureLens is one of many analytical tools that are currently in development, such as Stéfan Sinclair’s Voyeur or the suite of applications available through academic consortia like Tapor, INK-E, or Philologic.

  26. John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne, “The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, 1888–1917,” Theory and Society 26, no. 2/3 (1997): 305–56.

  27. See Andrew Piper, “Reading’s Refrain: From Bibliography to Topology,” Reading: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Joseph Slaughter (Cambridge, MA: English Institute in Collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, forthcoming), and Andrew Piper and Mark Algee-Hewitt, “The Werther Effect,” in Distant Readings/Descriptive Turns: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, forthcoming).

  28. See the foundational study of Werther’s influence, Klaus Scherpe, Werther und Wertherwirkung: Zum Syndrom bürgerlicher Gesellschaftsordnung im 18. Jahrhundert (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1970).

  29. The term has been popularized by Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2007). The practices of distant reading are actually quite common to the older work of stylistics or authorship attribution, where statistical techniques of reading have proven very successful at identifying to whom unknown works belong, still an important feature used today in trying to determine how documents are alike. The turn to using the term “distant reading” is a way of capturing a new interest in questions of scale.

  30. Indeed, such interfaces take us all the way back to the form of the list itself, one of the most elementary types of reading (and of course adding). See Lucie Dolezalová, ed., The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (Paris: Musée du Louvre/Rizzoli, 2009); Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

  31. For his discussion of the importance of repetition and the refrain in the making of “The Raven,” see E. A. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 13–25.

  32. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 218.

  33. See Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).

  34. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glen W. Most (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), and my work on the history of the critical edition, Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 85–120.

  35. Stéfan Sinclair, Stan Ruecker, and Peter Organisciak, “Ubiquitous Text Analysis,” Poetess Archive Journal 2, no. 1 (2010): http://paj.muohio.edu/paj/index.php/paj/article/view/13.

  36. On global literacy rates, see Human Development Report 2009: Published for the United Nations Development Programme (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 171–75. On disability and education in the United States, see Thomas D. Snyder and Sally A. Dillow, Digest of Education Statistics 2010 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, 2011). On adult functional literacy, see Reach Higher, America: Report of the National Commission on Adult Literacy (Washington, DC: Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy, 2008).

  EPILOGUE

  1. Jean Paul, Flegeljahre (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 127.

  2. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” in Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 24.

  3. For a thorough review of the entire field of book art, see Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a history of the destruction of books, see Fernando Báez, A Un
iversal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Atlas, 2008).

  4. Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer, vol. 4 (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956), 401, 376.

  5. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 305.

  6. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 301.

  7. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2005), 40–41.

  8. For the importance of redundancy, see the founding work of communication theory, Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), and more recently, Jack P. Hailman, Coding and Redundancy: Man-Made and Animal Evolved Signals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). For the significance of informational redundancy to the field of genetics, see Donald R. Forsdyke, Evolutionary Bioinformatics, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer, 2011).

  9. Briefe von Alexander von Humboldt an Varnhagen von Ense (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1860), 20.

  10. See Susan Dalton, Nikola von Merveldt, Tom Mole, and Andrew Piper, et al., Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700–1900 (forthcoming).

  11. Victor Hugo famously created a scene in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1832) in which an observer points first at a book and then at a church and says, “This will kill that.” Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 190.