About halfway through my project — knee-deep in JQuery code, an unfamiliar Other of a whole new order for this traditionally-trained humanities student — I experienced a gestalt switch: that is, I no longer "knew" theoretically but knew quite literally the social-, historical- and institutional-embeddedness of media forms. There is nothing like hours spent searching Javascript tutorials, hacker blogs and plug-in libraries, clicking CTRL-U to peek beneath the hood of every page, to understand that media are, in the words of Lisa Gitelman, "socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice."^{12Gitelman 7.} In the same vein, it feels disingenuous — silly, even — to wax poetical about the ease and facility, the "speed and light" of digital media after cracking open the plastic casing on my aging laptop to physically solder the power pin back to the motherboard in order to avoid losing all of my work.^{13See Matthew Kirschenbaum on "medial ideology": "At the core of a medial ideology of electronic text is the notion that in place of inscription, mechanism, sweat of the brow (or its mechanical equivalent steam), and cramp of the hand, there is light, reason, and energy unleashed in the electric empyrean" (Kirschenbaum 39; see 36ff).} Even the shift from the physical to the digital archive was instructive: after several days spent in the rare book room at Yale's Beinecke Library, I ordered and received a digital facsimile of a volvelle I was studying, only to find its beautiful nest of interlocking paper wheels flattened to what looked like a map or circle diagram, all of its tactility and movement lost in the ostensibly more "interactive" screen.