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IN THEIR DEFENSES OF USING new media in the discipline of English literary history, the apologists for "Digital Humanities" are careful to admit that computers may not in fact do anything "new" to literature. For instance, in a recent talk titled "New Methods for the Humanities," John Unsworth reassures literary historians that computers are not as alienating as they might seem:
"Imagining what you already know" is a good description of modeling in many humanities contexts: for example, in building a model of Salisbury Cathedral, or the Crystal Palace, as we did at the Institute in Virginia, you could say that we were imagining what you already know about those structures. However, interestingly, the act of modeling almost always brings to the surface of awareness things you didn't know you knew, and often shows you significant gaps in your knowledge that-of course-you didn't know were there. Of course, in some cases-maybe even in all cases that I've mentioned-one could (in principle) do this kind of modeling and even the quantitative analysis without computers: you could model the crystal palace with toothpicks and plastic wrap; you could do the painstaking word-counting and frequency comparison by hand. But you wouldn't, because there are other interesting things you could do in far less time.1
"Far less time," and with greater ease: computers have affordances that make what we do with them more likely, but these methods for analyzing our disciplinary objects never were impossible.
As all the major digital humanists acknowledge, computers represent rather than incarnate artifacts. Programs and documents sent as email attachments are, for a millisecond at least, inscribed nowhere but in electricity or light, in the fiber-optic cables and telephone lines transmitting them through cyberspace: on the computer a "thing" is not inscribed but merely stored.2 As Johanna Drucker puts it, "code storage" is a "mutable condition." As software or code, computers create what is always a representation of an artifact, even if that artifact is digitally born. According to Drucker, "[A] document can be stored in an electronic form and then output through a variety of devices to produce musical notes, graphical forms, patterns of lights in a theatrical stage, or letters on a page. There is no necessary relation between the material form...