McGann 2001

"understanding the structure of digital space requires a disciplined aesthetic intelligence" (xi)

"The general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and explain aesthetic works -- until, that is, they expand our interpretational procedures." (xii)

Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993-2000

post-romantic procedural writing (e.g. Jarry); "the fact that texts and documents and fields open to decisive and rule-governed manipulations. In this view of the matter texts and documents are not primarily understood as containers or even vehicles of meaning. Rather, they are sets of instantiated rules and algorithms for generating and controlling themselves and for constructing further sets of transmissional possibilities." (2)

libraries the first institutions to affect/be affected by digital media; computational scholars did their work, archives continued digitization: and the arrival of W3 went barely noticed (4-5)

"Modern computational tools are extremely apt to execute one of the two permanent functions of scholarly criticism -- the editorial and archival function, the remembrance of things past. So great is their aptitude in this foundational area that we stand on the edge of a period that will see the complete editorial transformation of our inherited cultural archive. That even is neither a possibility nor a likelihood; it is a certainty." (18)

"The next generation of literary and aesthetic theorists who will most matter are people who will be at least as involved with making things as with writing texts." (19)