30/04/13 A Companion to Digital Literary Studies

nora.lis.uiuc.edu:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-8&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-6-8&brand=978140514… 1/1

adapted to the Blackwell DTD by Jonathan Gorman

Cite as: A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens.

Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

Presented with the permission of

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6. Multimedia and Multitasking: A Survey of Digital Resources for Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies 7. Hypertext and Avant-texte in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature

Part III: Textualities 8. Reading Digital Literature: Surface, Data, Interaction, and Expressive Processing 9. Is There a Text on This Screen Reading in an Era of Hypertextuality 10. Reading on Screen: The New Media Sphere 11. The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space 12. Handholding, Remixing, and the Instant Replay: New Narratives in a Postnarrative World 13. Fictional Worlds in the Digital Age 14. Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction 15. Too Dimensional: Literary and Technical Images of Potentiality in the History of Hypertext 16. Private Public Reading: Readers in Digital Literature Installation 17. Digital Poetry: A Look at Generative, Visual, and Interconnected Possibilities in its First Four Decades 18. Digital Literary Studies: Performance and Interaction 19. Licensed to Play: Digital Games, Player Modifications, and Authorized Production 20. Blogs and Blogging: Text and Practice

Part IV: Methodologies 21. Knowing : Modeling in Literary Studies 22. Digital and Analog Texts 23. Cybertextuality and Philology 24. Electronic Scholarly Editions 25. The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature 26. Algorithmic Criticism 27. Writing Machines 28. Quantitative Analysis and Literary Studies 29. The Virtual Library 30. Practice and Preservation Format Issues 31. Character Encoding Annotated Overview of Selected Electronic Resources

William Winder

Writing Machines

27.

Writing Machines

William Winder

They used to say, my friend, that the words of the oak in the holy place of Zeus at Dodona were the first prophetic utterances. people of that time, not being so wise as you young folks, were content in their simplicity to hear an oak or a rock, spoke the truth.

(Phaedrus 275b—c)

Writing

Writing in a new key

It has been the fleets of humming word processors, not the university mainframe computers nor the roaring newspaperprinting presses of the turn of the nineteenth century, that have drawn humanists to writing machines and theirindustrialized texts (Winder 2002). We write perhaps less and less, but we process more and more, with computersworking quietly in the background. And only in the dead silence of a computer crash where hours of work havedisappeared do we understand clearly how much our writing depends on machines. Formatters, spell checkers, thesauri,grammar checkers, and personal printers support our writing almost silently. Yet we suspect that today's ubiquitousediting and display functions will seem quaint in ten years' time, perhaps as quaint and mysterious as the thump of atypewriter's carriage shift.

Computers are necessarily writing machines. When computers process words, they generate text and a great deal of it.Library catalogues over the globe spew out countless replies to queries (author, keyword, call number, title, subjectheading, year, language, editor, series, …); banking machines unabashedly greet us, enquire discreetly about our