Thus instead of a linear text, I've produced a digital mechanism that, like the objects of my study, forces the reader to participate in the process of making meaning. On the one hand, this medium allows me to present a comparative history without compromising specificity or reducing the complexity of one moment to a mere reflection of another; yet it still strives for thematic cohesion by using our digital present quite literally as a map for exploring programmatic epistemologies in our past. Like our current media ecology, this map can be, in the words of many of my test users, "disorienting," a Borgesian textual labyrinth. I sympathize with these frustrations. As students and scholars, we are not primed to participate in reading texts as any more than "critical interpreters" who absorb and repurpose language, and writing is still presented as an act of "originality." In other words, the practice of cutting up and combining texts — that is, manipulating language materially — is almost entirely absent from our current conceptual model of literacy. Yet such forms of reading and writing are one facet to the infinitely complex history of both the book and (if the recent avalanche of literature on new media literacies is any indication) the book-to-come. By both presenting and enacting the very mechanisms I theorize, I hope to put a neglected past in conversation with our present while still waving "goodbye to much that is familiar."