McGann 2002

McGann, Jerome. "Dialogue and Interpretation at the Interface of Man and Machine: Reflections on Textuality and a Proposal for an Experiment in Machine Reading." Computers and the Humanities 36.1 (February 2002): 95-107.

"What is text? I am not so naive as to imagine that question could ever be finally settled. Asking such a question is like asking 'How long is the coast of England?'. But now we have to ask it again because when the questino was re-posed by our digital culture, the humanities response proved inadequate: on one hand a reactionary refusal to admit that this new culture had any right to ask such a question (Sven Birkerts); on the other, the emergence of TEI and the proposal that its view of text would serve the interests of humanities scholars for digital culture." (96)

"A page of printed or scripted text should thus be understood as a certain kind of graphic interface. The complexity of the interface varies from a minimal use of the bibliographical codes open to a given paperspace -- the text you are now reading is a good instace of such simplicity -- to highly elaborated interfaces like those determined as poetic texts." (100)