pre-publication: twenty years after the death of the book: literature, the humanities, and the...

8/13/2019 Pre-publication: Twenty Years After the Death of the Book: Literature, the Humanities, and the Knowledge Economy

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ESC . (March ): xxyy

Te Death of the Bookwenty years ago, the book was guratively laid to rest by artist Dennis

Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. An artbook wrapped in a shroud of cheesecloth and placed in a clam-shelledslate-grey case, deliberately distressed, seemingly time-scarred and bat-

tered, Agrippa (a book of the dead) ( ) evokes a disinterred coffin. Tosewho encounter the physical object must exhume the books corpse toread it. Inside the book are traces of texts and images, illegible and fadedinscriptions, and, embedded in a niche in the middle, a . -inch oppy diskcontaining a self-encrypting poem by Gibson about his father, who diedwhen the author was six. Te book and the poem examine the inscriptionof lived sensory experience, books and bodies, memory and technology,loss and decay, the tenuous provisionality of knowledge and understanding.

Agrippa refers at once to the name of a particular photograph album soldby Kodak in the s ( Agrippa Files , item ) and to the second-centuryGreek philosopher who formulated the Five Modes of skepticism. Gibsoncould not have known that Kodak would declare bankruptcy in , butalready in the company had been criticized for its complacency while

silver halide photography, the technology that Kodak invented yearsago, is slowly being eclipsed by electronic images ( aylor and Caminiti).

Twenty Years After the Death of the Book:Literature, the Humanities, and the

Knowledge Economy Allison Muri

University of Saskatchewan


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Te modes of Agrippa are known today only because they were recordedby Sextus Empiricus, whose Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Math-ematicians are the only existing detailed accounts of Greek skepticism. Hedid not name Agrippa, but Diogenes Laertius ascribed the Five Modes tohim in Lives of the Philosophers . At once, then, the title Agrippa indicatesthe technological obsolescence of various mechanisms humans have usedto inscribe and retrieve memory and history, the fragility of those recordsand the uncertainty of what they tell, and a philosophical skepticism aboutevidence that questions the possibility of any justied theory of knowledge.

Te commentary by Gibson, Ashbaugh, and Begos on the nature ofbooks, digital media, and knowledge are well worth revisiting in thisissue on the Future of the Humanities, with the increasing prevalenceof digital books (including documents, texts, games, social media, andso on) and digital scholarship. Agrippa (a book of the dead) was a replyto increasing speculations on the effects of the books supposed demise

upon the value of literature, the humanities, and knowledge itself withthe arrival of networked communications, Bulletin Board Systems ( s),Usenet, the establishment of World Wide Web protocols, and graphi-cal user interfaces. Te death of the book coincided with the rise ofthe so-called knowledge society, and what Agrippa told us at that crucialmoment just after the invention of the World Wide Web still speaks tothe roles of books and digital works in the discipline of literature and inthe humanities in general.

Te death of the book had been predicted long before Agrippa waspublished. As early as Lester Asheim had speculated on it in his

introduction to a special issue of Te Library Quarterly on New Prob-lems in Plotting the Future of the Book. Musing on the possibility thatthe library would not necessarily remain primarily a book agency ( ),Asheim noted

there is nothing eternal and God-given about the format anddimension of the book as we happen now to know it. Someof the greatest items in our own cultural heritage, which we

Some of the more important of these included Richard Lanhams Te Electronic

Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution ( ); Robert Coovers TeEnd of Books ( ); Representations , a special issue on Future Libraries( ), including Geoffrey Nunbergs Te Places of Books in the Age of Elec-tronic Reproduction; the symposium Te Future of the Book held atthe University of San Marino, which culminated in the collection Te Future ofthe Book edited by Geoffrey Nunberg ( ); Elizabeth Eisensteins Te Endof the Book? Some Perspectives on Media Change ( ).

A M isAssociate Professor of

English at the Universityof Saskatchewan. Her

research interestsinclude digital media

studies and the historyand technologies of

communication. Hercurrent project, TeGrub Street Project,is a digital edition of

eighteenth-centuryLondon, focusingprimarily on print

culture and heterotopiasof literature and art

in contemporaryrepresentations of the

city.


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Twenty Years After the Death |

now equate with the book, were not intended for book formand were committed to the page by other hands. ( )

Marshall McLuhan echoed predictions of the books decline in a interview by Alan Millar of the : Just as books and their private pointof view are being replaced by the new media, he explained, so the con-cepts which underlie our actions, our social life, are changing. Further,

Books are what gave the Renaissance its peculiar stamp. We had to see theworld and each other through the printed line on the page. oday there aremany media of information, many teaching machines. Te books role hasdiminished because of all the other actors. Its no longer king, but subject( : : ). While he did not comment on the book itself, Jean-FranoisLyotard too predicted in Te Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl-edge ( ) that technological transformations, including communica-tion and cybernetics, computers and computer languages, problems of

information storage and databanks, and so on, can be expected to have aconsiderable impact on knowledge. Specically, Te nature of knowledgecannot survive unchanged. It can t into the new channels, and becomeoperational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information( ). It was not until the s, however, that the books death (or itsfuture as something other than itself) began to register as anything otherthan provocative musings. In Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, andthe Remediation of Print ( ), Jay David Bolter famously predicted that

the idea and the ideal of the book will change: print will no longer denethe organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past ve

centuries ( ). Equally famously, and with signicantly more pessimism,Sven Birkerts worried that more than any other development in recentmemory, these interactive technologies throw into relief the fundamentalquestions about knowledge and learning:

Tere is a danger with these sexy new options that we willsimply assume that their uses and potentials extend acrossthe educational spectrum into realms where different kinds ofknowledge, and hence learning, are at issue. Te realms, thatis, of Geisteswissenschaften [so-called sciences of culture],which have at their center the humanitie. ( )

At the same time, government discussion and position papers adoptedmetaphors of the new information highway as a means toward progress,nation-building, and prosperity founded upon knowledge transfer. Teassociation with knowledge here had little to do with humanities scholar-


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ship and much to do with government expectations for and predictionsof future labour, business, and prot. Te terms knowledge industries,

knowledge society, and knowledge economy had been popularizeddecades before by Peter F. Drucker in his best-selling book Te Age of

Discontinuity ( ), but they took on a new lustre following the popular-ization of the personal computer and the World Wide Web. In the UnitedStates, nascent policies were articulated in the position paper echnol-ogy for Americas Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build EconomicStrength by newly elected President Bill Clinton and Vice-President AlGore ( ): International competitiveness depends less and less on tra-ditional factors such as access to natural resources and cheap labor, theypredicted. Instead, the new growth industries are knowledge based ( ).

Accelerating the introduction of an efficient, high-speed communicationsystem can have the same effect on economic and social developmentas public investment in the railroads had in the th century ( ), they

wrote. Further, Just as the interstate highway system marked a histori-cal turning point in our commerce, today information superhighwaysable to move ideas, data, and images around the country and around theworldare critical to American competitiveness and economic strength( ).

In the following year Canadian Industry Minister John Manley formedthe Information Highway Advisory Council ( ) to make recommen-dations to the government on the future of digital communications andinnovations in Canada. Industry Canadas discussion paper released inApril outlined the issues upon which would provide advice and

opened with a statement from Manley: A new knowledge-based economythat is emerging in Canada requires a new advanced infrastructuretheelectronic highway (Industry Canada ). As the discussion paperwent on to explain, the Canadian Vision for the Information Highwaywas that such an infrastructure would act as the catalyst for Canada asa vital and competitive knowledge-based society. Borrowing from therhetoric of Clinton and Gore, it explained:

Te Canadian information and communications infrastruc-ture will be a key factor in Canadas successful transition to

an economy in which value, jobs and wealth are based on thecreation, movement and application of information. Like therailroads, waterways and roads that formed the transportationinfrastructure of the industrial economy, the information high-way will carry peoples ideas and the information services that


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infrastructure for st century scholarship (www.diggingintodata.org).While the Institutes for Advanced opics in the Digital Humani-ties continues to explicitly support qualitative research topics along withtextual analysis and data mining (National Endowment for the Humani-ties ), the prospect of big data has meant that quantication and datamining have gained signicant purchase in pecuniary considerations ofdigital methods and tools. Franco Morettis proposal for distant reading(a method that involves schematic representations such as graphs andtrees, statistical analysis, and mapping of texts as opposed to traditionalliterary close readings) holds real promise, especially if it is done in com-bination with the close readings and explications with which humanitiesscholars have always engaged.

Tis question is not, therefore, one of empiricism versus theorybothare valuable in certain contextsbut is, rather, a question of what quan-tication and data mining or text mining seem to provide. Quantitative

analysis and text markup hold the promise that new discoveries can bemade in the humanities that have never been possible before in our tra-ditional, print-based processes of methodical reading, study, and reread-ing of a single text. Tese new methods also carry the allure of relevancefor scholars with expertise in textual and literary studies in a knowledgeeconomy dominated by industry, engineering and computer science, andthe sciences.

See, for example, the May report by McKinsey Global Institute, Big data:Te next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, which claimsthat the potential value from data in the [U.S. health care] sector could bemore than billion in value every year. In the private sector a retailerusing big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin bymore than percent. big data can be used to create value across sectors ofthe global economy. we are on the cusp of a tremendous wave of innovation,productivity, and growth, as well as new modes of competition and value cap-tureall driven by big data as consumers, companies, and economic sectorsexploit its potential ( ) (www.mckinsey.com/Insights/ /Research/ echnol-ogy_and_Innovation/Big_data_Te_next_frontier_for_innovation). In March

, the U.S. government announced its Big Data Research and DevelopmentInitiative, claiming that By improving our ability to extract knowledge and in-sights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promisesto help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen

our national security, and transform teaching and learning. Te six federaldepartments and agencies that announced over million in new researchand development investments included National Science Foundation and theNational Institutes of Health (Core echniques and echnologies for Advanc-ing Big Data Science and Engineering), the Department of Defense (Data toDecisions), the National Institutes of Health ( Genomes Project DataAvailable on Cloud), the Department of Energy (Scientic Discovery Trough


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United Kingdom and the United States. A strong digitaleconomy will be the backbone of Canadas future prosperityand success. Consequently, we all have a role to play in shap-ing the future of this key part of our economy and our lives.Universities, colleges, research institutions and businesses willneed to work more closely together to continue to conduct

and commercialize research, moving ideas from universityand college labs into the marketplace, where Canadians andthe global economy can benet. ( Improving Canadas Digital

Advantage: Strategies for Sustainable Prosperity )

In , named digital media as one of its ve priority areas. Itsoutcomes still explicitly valued humanistic approaches to digital research(see table). In , however, the title of this priority area was changed toDigital Economy, with a greater emphasis on positioning Canada in aglobal context, optimizing benets for Canada, informing policy, especially

in terms of business competition, investment, and innovation. wenty-sixpercent of the forty-ve successful applications for s Partner-ship Development Grants and Partnership Grants competition selected thedigital media priority area ( , May ). also invested signi-cantly in the Digging into Data Challenge, contributing ,of the total project funding of approximately . million ( , Janu-ary ). has continued to fund digital humanities projects focus-ing on historical, cultural, and literary studies, but dening the mostrelevant lines of inquiry, however well intended, subtly demarcates thequestions worthy to be asked and can potentially diminish the value of

the kinds of knowledge we study and express in the humanities. We (allscholarsnot just those in the digital humanities) need more dialoguetoday about how data and digital content both redene and reinscribeour expectations for knowledge work, more reminders of the instabilityof culture in our attempts to understand it through the lens of big data,and more searching analyses of quantication and knowledge productionthan we have devoted to date concerning the supposed demise of the book.

Knowledge, Books, Memory

Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphiteNow lostTen his nameW.F. Gibson Jr.and something, comma,


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o return, then, to Agrippa: what does this work suggest about the deathof the book? Gibsons work signals, rst, that it does not matter how ourknowledge is encoded; at the same time, whether he intended it or not,it points to some necessary changes in interpretive strategies when weexamine digital books, which move, which can be encrypted, which candie and be resurrected. It reminds us of the necessity to be mindful of themateriality of our books, whether they are paper or digital, and the effectsof that materiality on text and context; it reminds us that the reductionisminherent in certain forms of machine reading (the genome, the encryptionof a poem) represents just one facet of knowledge. We can use the wordcloud and collocation visualization tools created by Stfan Sinclair andGeoffrey Rockwell, for example, to count and visualize the poem text (seefacing page). Such visualizations certainly can be evocative and often resultin new questions or new insights, and especially so in longer textswordfrequency and collocation have long been valuable tools in linguistic and

literary analysisbut these visualizations also reinforce the incrediblelimitations of word counts alone, the importance of close reading andqualitative analysis along with treating books, documents, and communi-cations as data. Te issue is not so much one of quantication shoulderingits way into literary analysis as it is one of in what it is our universities arebeing asked to invest more and more heavily and what that might meanto perceptions of validand valuedknowledge.


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Agrippa collocation visualization, showing term frequencies in proximity tokeyword. Voyant ools: Links. http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/tools Links.

Agrippa word cloud text frequency visualization. Voyant ools: Cirrus. http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/tools Cirrus.


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What I want to do now is a provisional close reading of this book andpoem to model the difference between the digital analysis or mining oftexts stripped of their intended double meanings, allusions, or metaphors,of their material and historical contexts, and the necessary close reading,qualitative analysis, and subjective interpretations that humanistic studiesdemand. Understanding the materiality of this work, even if only throughimages and bibliographic descriptions as provided in Te Agrippa Files(Liu et al.), is crucial to understanding this remarkable and brilliant work,which has received surprisingly little attention in literary studies (perhaps,ironically, because the poem and facsimile pages do not appear in massmarket books and anthologies).

Several of the Agrippa s pages contain an aquatint print evoking gel electrophoresis, overprinted with antique newspaper and catalogueadvertisements for technological artifacts. Te overprints were originallyintended to vanish with exposure to light or air. Te majority of the books

pages contain two columns of forty-two lines, an allusion to GutenbergsBible printed in Mainz around , in Latin. While Ashbaughs textitself is legible, the inscriptions are incomprehensible to human readers:

reading, inscribing, and analyzing a sequence of is possible onlythrough machine preparation and computational analysis. Ashbaughsprints remind the reader of one of the most important knowledge questsof the twentieth century, an acknowledgment perhaps of the changingtides of valued scholarship, literacy, and information. In , the UnitedStates Congress had funded the Department of Energy ( ) and theNational Institutes of Health ( ) to begin work on a plan to sequence

the chemical bases of in the human genome, with projected costsof about million per year for approximately fteen years (HumanGenome Project). Te project to transcribe the so-called blueprint forlife inspired enthusiastic rhetoric concerning the future of knowledge,the sciences, and the economy (for example, DeLisi ; on the HumanGenome Project and the Book of Life or Book of Nature, see also Muri);the rhetorical implication was that we would understand humanity oncemachines had read, inscribed, and quantied life itself.

It was this intersection of faith in the promise of technology and sci-ence, the meaning of the book, and the attainability of knowledge abouthumankind to which Agrippa asked us to attend. Te pages of Agrippathen establish a number of thematic elements: knowledge and what itmeans at the beginning and the end of the printed book is illustrated herebut also the electronic trace of memory, playing through just once beforethe text is encrypted. In such a read-through of this poem, the moments


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Gibson describes are transient and all-too-soon forgotten like the lifethat they evoke and then are lost forever (this is clearly the intent of theencryption, though Gibson has since republished the poem on his website).Like the lives more enduringly inscribed in his grandfathers signaturein a broad smooth slab of poured / concrete (part ) or the limestonelining the banks and courthouses, fossilized records of fragmented ani-mal shells and skeletons (part ), this book provides for its readers onlyan attenuated and partial history in the material artifacts of lives oncelived. Mechanism and concrete are the two most common nouns inthis poem and in this art book, but ambiguity itself, elusive descriptionsand characterizations, metaphor and analogy are where meaning coalesce.

Gibsons poem, like Ashbaughs images, examines the themes ofmechanical obsolescence, sensory perception, memory, inscription,records, and knowledge. While it is impossible to say that his intentionwas to exemplify each of the ancient philosopher Agrippas ve modes or

grounds of doubt concerning the attainability of knowledge in the rst vesections of Agrippa , Gibson seems to make just such a series of allusions.Te rst of Agrippas modes, for example, concerns dispute, or undecid-able dissension with respect to some matter: this dispute prevents us fromchoosing or ruling out anything, so that we must fall back on suspensionof judgment (Annas and Barnes ). In this section Gibson juxtaposesthe eerie Kodak clarity of photographs pasted in the album against thedegradation or erasure of the inscriptions identifying the images. AuntFran and [obscured] or Ford Sr.? or either Ford or Arther or On theroof behind the barn, behind him, / can be made out this cryptic mark: /

H. V. J. M.[?], all point to the dispute between indecipherable labels anda moment recorded by the camera in perfect, focused, clarity. What thenarrator or the reader can know about the image is an elusive history. Inthe photograph a man is clear, or a culvert, but that moment is lost, thatname, sometimes even that place, and the photographers connectionand intent are all effaced. Te editorial hand here evident in the squarebrackets emphasizes the dissension between the clarity intended by thephotographer and collector, and the gaps acknowledged in the annotations.

Section II begins: Te mechanism: stamped black tin,

Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,A lensTe shutter fallsForeverDividing that from this.


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Tis section, foregrounding images of mechanismthe camera separat-ing a moment from its inscription, the gun separating life from deathmight recall the second of Agrippas ve modes, which derives fromarguments that throw one another into innite regress. What is broughtforward as proof itself needs another proof to make it credible, and soon to innity: we have no point from which to establish anything and somust suspend judgment. Is Mama here the same person as Moma insection I? Would these four photographs of Moma and Mama provideproof enough where the identifying text differs, or would we require moreevidence of identity? Moreover, what does this particular archive, Com-memorative / montages of the countrys World War dead found in thebottom drawer of a bureau mean ? What history do these works conveyto a son who barely knew his father and has such tenuous knowledge ofthis family history? Te narrator can derive meaning only from a relatedmemory: just as I myself discovered / one other summer in an attic trunk

a gun and ammunition, real little bits of war. Memory is faulty, how-ever: I took it up / and turning, entranced, down the unpainted / stair, tothe hallway where I swear / I never heard the rst shot. Even if reliable,memory can never establish credibility without further evidence. If hewere making an argument about guns, or war, or his own journey from youth to maturity, only a semblance of credibility is conferred by the statedmemory of vivid sensory experience. A reader would require further evi-dence of that recently red copper slug so hot, stilled energy, / it blisteredmy hand, or of the salt container long since thrown away, or of a grazedbanister possibly extant in an old house, to know if this text should be read

as an autobiographical record and not poetic licence (even then, could weknow that the gouge was caused by a bullet, that the gun was red by thatboy?). A related page in Agrippa is meant (so we are told) to call attentionto the material degradation of ink and paper, as if to provide further eet-ing evidence through the mechanism of print, itself a eeting technology.In Ashbaughs illustration there is a gun that looks rather like a Derringer,which the narrator says he traded away, but the image is from an adver-tisement for a Photogenic Pistol / For instantaneous photography atnight (item ). Ashbaugh intended the image, like the memory and thepoem, to fade away, perhaps before readers could possibly check the visualreference, before they could attempt to determine whether the impliedmechanism for these memories was likely to be the physical experience ofa gun or an unreliable memory triggered by the eeting moment capturedin a ash of light by camera: I swear / I never heard the rst shot echoes

Arthur and Ford shing / Shot by an adult in the rst section. Even

Even if reliable,

memory can

never establish

credibility

without further

evidence.


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while the book with its fading ink concept seems to evoke the death of thebook and print as mechanisms of evidence, the ink remains permanentand the art book carefully preserved in a number of libraries, while theconcept of the ink fading was realized only in a digital simulation createdby an unnamed designer and posted on Te Agrippa Files site.

Section sees a change in perspective, from describing and attempt-ing to decipher the photographs to a memory prompted by a photographof his parents house in . Te lines change to free verse, falling intothe rhythm of speech and evoking something closer to a natural speak-ing voice. Agrippas third mode refers to arguments from relativity: Teexisting object appears to be such-and-such relative to the subject judgingand to the things observed together with it, but we suspend judgment onwhat it is like in its nature (Annas and Barnes ). In this section, Gibsonmoves away from the detached, almost bibliographical descriptions of thephotographs in the rst section and the uncertain sensory memories of

the second, drawing instead on an apparent certainty in his own interpre-tations of his family. Te subjective position, however, always presents aparticular view from a limited perspective. Tey have moved down fromWheeling and my father wears his / city clothes, he writes, but only thenarrator or Gibson knows the precise meaning of city clothes. Te subject position of the boy with his gaze on the unpaved Main Street and itselectric street lamp presents a different reality from what his parents mightdescribe. Tere is a story in that move from Wheeling but no certainty inthe claim that My grandfather [] believed in concrete and plywood /particularly.

Agrippas fourth mode, hypothesis, begins from someone making anassumption without providing proof. Hypotheses can be false, or oppositehypotheses can be formulated, and so on, so we suspend judgment. Section

begins, He made it to the age of torqueite radio / but not much pastthat. How is the reader to interpret this line? orque Flite was Chryslersthree-speed automatic transmission, introduced in . orqueite radiocomes from the transcription of a torn clipping advertising a DeSoto Fire-dome in the previous section of the poem: torqueite radio, heather andpower steering and brakes. Heather , meaning heater , suggests Gibsonis calling attention to an error-lled advertisement, which should alsohave a comma after torqueite, but the original text extracted from theencrypted disk by Freek Wiedijk ( Agrippa Files , item ) actually reads

heater. Te idea of original text further problematizes surety, since thetext was extracted from the disk image by a process of dumping thewhole memory of an early Mac emulator process into a le and then cut-


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ting the poem from the junk text in that le (item ). Leaving that bib-liographical conundrum for now, the question is: Has Gibson deliberatelyproduced a variant text to aid interpretation, a common enough practiceof authorial revision and correction? Or is heather an ordinary problemof inadvertently introducing changes due to careless editing and thus onlyseems to point to a particular interpretation? In any case, if we assume

torqueite radio is a deliberate mistake, then the passage can be read asanother indication of the impossibility of arriving at certain knowledge;if we assume the mistake is not intended, then I have achieved nothingother than establishing a fairly shaky argument concerning Gibsons inten-tions. However, Gibson also writes in this section of the mystery untold,the other thing, / sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight andof indian-head pennies undisturbed since / the dawn of man, arguablyrepresenting other hypotheses clearly false or lacking in evidence. Eventhe material (literal) sign, the empirical sensory evidence veriable by

observation or experience, can establish the grounds for a false hypothesisand a dubious claim on certainty.Finally, section of Agrippa contains Gibsons rst expression of cer-

tain knowledge:

Tere it was that I was marked out as a writer,[...] and, yes,I knew then, knew utterly,the deal done in my heart forever,though how I knew not,nor ever have.

Te reciprocal mode is Agrippas fth and nal mode: it occurs when whatought to be conrmatory of the object under investigation needs to bemade convincingly by the object under investigation; then, being unableto take either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgement aboutboth (Annas and Barnes ). Surely the object under investigation is thesemi-ctional narrator (or Gibsons autobiographical self-reconstruction)and thus demonstrates the circularity of the reciprocal mode: how [Iknew] I knew not, he seems to be saying.

Te nal section sums up the former ve, much as Sextus Empiricusssummary of Agrippas modes does: Tat all objects of perception arerelative is clear: they are relative to those perceiving them. And objectsof thought are relative too: they are called objects of thought relative tothe thinker (Annas and Barnes ). Tere must have been a truelast time / I saw the station but I dont remember, Gibsons nal section


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begins. Te bus station is now torn down and the narrator displaced to thepresent moment in a distant place: Im walking through Chyoda-ku / in atyphoon [] / umbrella everted in the storms Pacic breath [] laughing /in the mechanism. Te ambiguity of these nal words again accentuatethe impossibility of interpreting even the most eloquent inscription: to me,they suggest that this impressionist image of the narrators reaction to thedefeated mechanism of the umbrella captures a memory as close to thelived moment that might be possible in a written work, and still we know

very little about this man, his life, his thoughts, his transitory presence inthe world. Laughing in the mechanism, in the moment, also suggests aghost in the machine, the living trace of a human life captured in digitalmemory. Interpretation is elusive; knowledge about this mans explorationof life and family is ambiguous at best.

Is this poem a skeptical demonstration of the uncertainty of knowl-edge? Te argument I have demonstrated concerning this poem and book

is a shaky one to be sure. Tere is tenuous but plausible evidence in thetext, partial, obscured, and gurative though it may be; there is also a greatdeal of subjective interpretation on the part of our narrator and on my own,and there is an inexplicable departure from the so-called original text thatmay support but at least does not refute my premise. What we know fromthis digital text, as with printed poetry and history, is partial, subjective,indeterminate, and yet, given the evidence we have and the interpretationof which we are capable, still compelling, telling, humanizing.

Te End of the End of the Book and the Future of (Digital)

HumanitiesIn an interview a year after Agrippa: A Book of the Dead had been released,Gibson explained: Im in the vanguard of the death-of-print crowd. Ilove books, and books as objects, but when you think about it, a library is just a pile of moldering organic materialits literally rotting. Soon enoughthe library will become something at the end of a modem (Killheffer).Gibson is right: there is no particular loss of knowledge and literature,no particular threat to the humanities with the rise of digital books, evenwhile we must be mindful of the specic questions posed in consideringmedia, culture, history, and knowledge. For some scholars of digital texts,the relevance of the question of the death of the book has receded in theface of more pressing questions. What do you do with a million books?is one aspect of this changing research landscape. Jerome McGann hasargued in his book Radiant extuality: Literature After the WorldWide Web that We have to break away from questions like Will the com-


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puter replace the book? So much more interesting are the intellectualopportunities that open at a revelatory historical moment such as we arepassing through (xii). Alan Liu archly suggested in that Te digitalis just the end of the end of the book (np) and later argued in a paperpresented in the panel on What is a Book? at the Unbound Book Con-ference at the Hague in , entitled Tis is Not a Book: Long Forms ofShared Attention in the Digital Age, that neither e-books nor the Guten-berg Bible are in fact books. Te idea that a book is a material object, heargued, is a rojan horse that inserts into the codex a whole tradition ofontological, epistemological, and cultural, that is to say, canonical assump-tions about the nature of the book. He suggested further that the bookis something more like a cultural desideratum: A long form of attentionintended for the permanent, standard, and authoritativei.e., sociallyrepeatable and valuedcommunication of human thought and experi-ence (usually through narrative, argumentative, or other programmatic

organizations of bound-together-yet-discrete textual, graphic, and hapticelements) ( : : ). In analyzing the digital documents we have beforeus now, it is the culturally signicant attributes of the book that we needto attend to, the long-form attention that we as a culture crave and value.Tats what we need to be able to nd in the future, and we dont have theinstruments to nd it now. What we will need, he says, are methodologiesto discern patterns, clusters, or long-form swirls of self-stabilizing clustersof knowledge and patterns of reading, the ability to visualize the socialnetworks of authors and documents over time ( : : ). Tis needis not in doubt: the incomprehensibly vast array of digital texts, whether

archival or born digitalthe messy unstructured texts of Google Booksdocuments, the highly structured texts created by individual scholars andsuch groups as the ext Creation Partnership, or new forms of creativewriting, jokes and storytelling, chronicling, and creating personal archivesthrough witter, Imgur, You ube, Reddit, Facebook, a variety of blog plat-forms, dynamic or static texts and multimedia on websites, all demandnew approaches to studying humankind; how this is accomplished, whattexts will comprise a canon, and what it will mean in terms of knowledge,however, is still very much in ux.

extual scholars have invested heavily in an approach that relies onadding hand-coded structured markup to the texts of archival booksand documents, while signicantly larger unstructured corpora such asGoogle Books inspire studies relying on statistical analysis. Because thetools are so new, and the methods as yet tested in limited circumstancescontrolled by a small team of researchers, many articles on the digital


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humanities argue that the tool or method does not necessarily providedenitive answers but, rather, prompts new questions. Te questionswe need to ask now are, do they prompt the best questions? Or, perhaps,could we improve on the kinds of questions digital tools prompt us to ask?

As McGann has cautioned, Digital technology used by humanitiesscholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing,and disseminating large bodies of materials, and on certain specializedproblems in computational stylistics and linguistics. the work rarelyengages those questions about interpretation and self-aware reection thatare central concerns for most humanities scholars and editors ( Radiantextuality xixii). How will databases and quantitative analysis produce

knowledge? As Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsenexplain with reference to my own Grub Street Project, even Robert Darn-ton, a proponent of digital libraries and of the value of digital monographs,has reservations about the assumption that a new argument on an old

subject can be expressed through images and database:Robert Darnton responded to Allison Muris Grub StreetProject by insisting that Pat Rogers had, in a book publishedin , already made the argument proposed by her data-base. Darnton thus articulated a skepticism that we all feel asto whether any database, granted the richness of detail andtechnological originality, [could] carry the argument further.

Are database and archive building simply a refusal to select,come to the point, and make an argument? ( )

Tis is a very good question, perhaps the question, facing digital humani-ties projects today. Certainly digital projects require more of us: webecome managers; we spend more time requesting funding for expensiveinfrastructures; we make decisions about infrastructure, programmingfunctionality, and interface, all decisions that in fact are a form of inter-pretation; we learn how to communicate our goals to collaborators in thecomputer sciences and to effectively collaborate with them; we assembledatasets; and we are then faced with the task of editing, cleaning, and nor-malizing the data. Geoffrey Rockwell notes in this issue how Alan Galey,Stan Ruecker, and the eam have presented case studies in How aPrototype Argues of how experimental design prototypes could be evalu-ated as reied arguments. Tey look at how a design presents an argument,how it handles objections, how it is an original contribution, and how it ispart of a research trajectory ( ), and provides some direction of thingsto discuss in terms of evaluation. I agree. We certainly need to consider

The questions

we need to ask

now are, do

they prompt th

best

questions? Or

perhaps, could we improve on

the kinds of

questions digit

tools prompt u

to ask?


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these costly investments of time, energy, and output when we evaluatedigital scholarship in tenure and promotions cases. But we need to makethe distinction between a contribution for the sake of evaluation (wherethe exploratory nature of our work often impedes our ability to make newdiscoveries or observations) and an argument, the traditional format forpresenting and interpreting the results of our scholarship. Is a prototype anargument? I think it is not. If we want to move digital humanities into anarena where our work is perceived to be relevant, both by non-humanistsand non-digital-humanists alike, we need to start making the argumentsabout our discoveriesand arguments about (and frank evaluations of)the new questions our programs and visualizations provoke. We need toarticulate these to our colleagues, and we need to articulate these to thoseoutside our elds.

I am not saying anything new when I say that text mining, quantitativeanalysis, and markup do not solve the problem of interpretation, of context,

of history, culture, and the material conditions of a works production.Every digital humanist understands this. A problem that we encounterin reconguring the work of the humanities as data-driven, however, inembracing the scientic epistemology of quantitative and empirical mod-eling of information, in accepting that industry, innovation, and businessshould drive research, is that these assumptions about knowledge valuestend to effaceor at least displace, and certainly deferthe more qualita-tive humanistic methods and interpretations that have so far distinguisheddisciplinary research in the humanities. Tis is not at all to say that quan-titative analysis of data does not belong in the humanities; rather, it is to

say that quantitative analysis applied to questions about literature, history,culture, and language needs, so often, to be more than just the numbersor the visualizations.

Tis is why, twenty years later, Agrippa: A Book of the Dead remainssuch a powerful exposition of media and knowledge: the various repre-sentations of inscribed upon those pages evoke the power of quan-tication and computer analysis of big data. Tat genetic code inscribedupon the material body, a code we can count and analyze and upon whichwe could make conclusions about a life and a body, can never resurrectwhat we recognize as human: the evocative and ambiguous moment oflaughter in the rain. Te fact that the genetic sequences in Agrippa weretranscribed from the Drosophila genome perhaps emphasizes how littlethe code itself means in comparison to the creative object as a whole:

Te intent was never to reproduce a specic sequence in type or images,according to Begos. Te messy ambiguities of human experience simply


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cannot be counted, ordered into arbitrary hierarchies or schema, and thenbe made legible. No markup scheme or quantication of this book and thetext inscribed on the computer disk inside could tell us about the meaningof this work, either in isolation or as part of a set of a million books. Andwhile Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen are absolutely right to suggest Tisis a period of experimentation with scholarly form, and some of the mostuseful work will not look like anything else that we recognize as scholarly.failure is to be expected and valued ( ), we have important arguments tomake about the knowledge economy and the humanities contributionsto it. How we engage with visualizing and disseminating new knowledgeas subjective, indeterminate, and contingent as everremains to be seen.How we claim our position in the so-called knowledge economy remainsto be seen. Tere is no question that we have obstacles to overcome nowthat books in print are being eclipsed by digital books in all their forms,but we cannot, as Sven Birkerts implored so many years ago, refuse it.

We need to understand and engage with digital books and tools; we neededitors; we need to clearly articulate the continued provisionality of theknowledge and tools used in digital humanities studies; we need to seethe value in mistakes and discoveries as we encounter big data; we needto make explicit arguments about our tools, and about our visualizationsof this data; we need to assert our position in the digital economy, evenif its to say, repeatedly, and obviously, knowledge is more than all that.

Evolution of s Digital Research Strategies

ITST program, introduced2003

Digital Media Priority Area,introduced 2010

Digital Economy Priority Area,introduced 2011

Digital Research Grant Objectives / Priority Area Expected Outcomes

reflect on, interpret, andanalyze new digital media,multimedia, and text-basedcomputing technologies,and integrate these intohumanities and social

sciences research; bring together theorists,

experimentalists, andtechnologists fromdifferent disciplines to

insights and expertisegenerated on digital mediaand its impact on culture,the economy and society;

new digital media,

multimedia, and text-basedcomputing tools reflectedon, interpreted, analyzedand integrated intohumanities and socialsciences research;

deepen our understandingof:

o the evolving digitaleconomy, itsopportunities,challenges, and

impacts on society,industry, individualsand the environment;

o the role of digitaltechnologies andmedia;


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share and nurture ideasand methods that challengeresearch to advancethrough the use of audio- visual and text-basedtechnologies; and

facilitate the creation ofnational and internationalnetworks of, andpartnerships ... that willpromote and sustain socialsciences and humanitiesresearch and resourcesworldwide.

increased sharing andnurturing of ideas, andmethods that advanceresearch through the use ofaudio-visual and text-basedtechnologies ...; and/or

national and internationalnetworks of, andpartnerships ... that willpromote and sustain socialsciences and humanitiesresearch and resourcesworldwide.

o the changes inbehaviour and ways oflearning and workingthat would optimizebenefits for Canadians;and

o how to positionCanada in a globalcontext;

inform policy and actionsthrough evidence, analysis,and insights on key issuesand problems, includinghow policy and regulatoryframeworks affect citizenintegration in the digital

economy and businesscompetition, investmentand innovation in keysectors;

promote engagement inresearch and sustainedrelationships with policy-makers, practitioners,professional associations,community organizations,and end users of research;and/or

provide new researchinsights on individuals andtheir societies through thecreation and use ofdigitized content (text,graphics and images, audio, video) as a method ofresearch inquiry andthrough innovation inresearch.


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Works Cited

Annas, Julia, and Jonathan Barnes, eds. SextusEmpiricus: Outlines of Scep-ticism. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge , .

Ashbaugh, Dennis, William Gibson, and Kevin Begos, Jr. Agrippa (a bookof the dead) . New York: Kevin Begos Publishing, .

Possible topics and areas to be addressed / Potential lines of inquiry

electronic editing andpublishing;

e-literature;

Web programming; immersive and virtual

environments inmultimedia research;

textual analysis;

3D imaging technology;

creativity, culture, andcomputing;

n/a

(SSHRC, Priority Area:Digital Media)

Capacity to innovate usingdigital technologies

Building a world-classdigital infrastructure

Growing the informationand communicationstechnology industry

Creating Canadas digitalcontent advantage

Building digital skills fortomorrow

Research in the digital era digital image design;

information aesthetics;

computer gaming; and

knowledge transfer ofresearch results to fellowresearchers, decision-makers and the public at

large.

(SSHRC, Image, Text, Sound andTechnology Research Grants)

(SSHRC, Priority Area:Digital Economy)


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Birdsall, William. Policy and Participation on the Information Highway. First Monday . ( ). http://rstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ / .

Birkerts, Sven. Te Gutenberg Elegies: Te Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, .

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Te Computer, Hypertext, and the Historyof Writing . New York: Routledge, .

Clinton, William, and Albert Gore. echnology for Americas EconomicGrowth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength . Washington:White House, . March . www.eric.ed.gov/ / .pdf.

Coover, Robert. Te End of Books. New York imes Book Review. June: , .

Crane, Gregory. What Do You Do with a Million Books? D-Lib Magazine . ( ). www.dlib.org/dlib/march /crane/ crane.html.

DeLisi, Charles. Te Human Genome Project: Te Ambitious Proposal toMap and Decipher the Complete Sequence of Human . AmericanScientist . ( ): .

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. Te End of the Book? Some Perspectives onMedia Change. American Scholar . ( ): .

Gibson, William. AGRIPPA (A Book of Te Dead). www.williamgibson-books.com/source/agrippa.asp.

Human Genome Project. Understanding Our Genetic Inheritance. TeFirst Five Years: Fiscal Years . (National Institutes of Health,

). www.genome.gov/ .

Industry Canada. Improving Canadas Digital Advantage: Strategies forSustainable Prosperity . . http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_ /ic/Iu - - -eng.pdf.

. Preparing Canada for a Digital World: Final Report of the Informa-tion Highway Advisory Council . September . http://web.archive.org/web/ /http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/ /ih e.html.

.Te Canadian Information Highway: Building Canadas Informa-tion and Communications Infrastructure. April . http://web.archive.org/web/ /http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/ /ih e.html.

Killheffer, Robert K. J. Interview with William Gibson. Publishers Weekly . ( September ): .


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Lanham, Richard. Te Electronic Word: Literary Study and the DigitalRevolution. New Literary History . , issue on echnology, Models,and Literary Study ( ): .

Liu, Alan. Tis is Not a Book: Long Forms of Shared Attention in the Digi-tal Age. Presented at the Unbound Book Conference, Te Hague. May . http://e-boekenstad.nl/unbound/index.php/media/session-

-unbound-book/ unique-indentier.. Te End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins,

and Social Computing. Michigan Quarterly Review , special issueon Bookishness: Te New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age ( ):

. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;view=text;rgn=main;idno=act . . ;cc=mqr;xc= ;g=mqrg.

Liu, Alan, Paxton Hehmeyer, James Hodge, Kimberly Knight, David Roh,and Elizabeth Swanstrom, eds. Te Agrippa Files . December .http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu. For references to particular materials,see the itemized inventory: http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/category/study-tools-subcategories/item-inventory.

McGann, Jerome. Radiant extuality: Literature After the World WideWeb . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, .

McLuhan, Marshall. Interview by Alan Millar. Explorations . . May. January . www.cbc.ca/archives/categories/arts-entertain-

ment/media/marshall-mcluhan-the-man-and-his-message/world-is-a-global-village.html.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, rees: Abstract Models for a Literary His-tory. London: Verso, .

Muri, Allison. Virtually Human: Te Electronic Page, the Archived Body,and Human Identity. Te Future of the Page . Eds. Peter Stoicheff andAndrew aylor. oronto: University of oronto Press, . .

National Endowment for the Humanities. Institutes for Advanced opicsin the Digital Humanities [Program Description]. www.neh.gov/les/grants/advanced-topics-digital-humanitites-march- - .pdf.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. Te Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Repro-duction. Representations , special issue on Future Libraries ( ):

.

Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. Te Future of the Book . Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, .


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. Eight international funders announce the winners of the Digging into Data Challenge. January . www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/news_room-salle_de_presse/press_releases-communiques/ /data_winners-gagnants_des_donnees_numeriques-eng.aspx.

. Digital Economy. July . www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/priority_areas-domaines_

prioritaires/digital_research-recherche_numerique-eng.aspx.. Digital Economy: Research in the digital era. July . www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/priority_areas-domaines_prioritaires/digital_research_ -recherche_numerique_ -eng.aspx.

. Digital Economy: Creating Canadas digital content advantage. July . www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-nancement/programs-

programmes/priority_areas-domaines_prioritaires/digital_research_ -recherche_numerique_ -eng.aspx.

. News. May . www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/news_room-salle_de_presse/latest_news-nouvelles_recentes/sshrc_news_may_ -nouvelles_crsh_mai_ -eng.aspx.

. Priority Area: Digital Media. July . http://web.archive.org/web/ /http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-nance-ment/programs-programmes/priority_areas-domaines_prioritaires/digital_research-recherche_numerique-eng.aspx.

.Image, ext, Sound, and echnology Research Grants. June.http://web.archive.org/web/ /http://www.sshrc-

crsh.gc.ca/funding-nancement/programs-programmes/itst/research_grants-subventions_recherche-eng.aspx .

aylor, Alex, and Susan Caminiti. Kodak Scrambles to Refocus. Fortune Magazine ( March ). http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/ / / / /index.htm.

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