1. Beyond Books:
materiality of literature
Giorgio Guzzetta
Books are falling: http://futuread.hypotheses.org/

2. Humanities Computing’s Oxymoron
I have adopted ‘humanities computing’ in
particular for certain suggestive qualities in the
name: a potential still to be taken as an
oxymoron, thus raising the question of what the
two activities it identifies have to do with each
other. (McCarty 2005)

3. Despotism of Numbers
There is something about numbers today that
almost seems to call out for a return to large-
scale thinking, be it a return to longue durée
historiography (if with attention to issues of
socio-economic inequality) recently advocated
by historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage or the
shift to “distance reading” through graphs, maps
and trees, posited by literary scholar Franco
Moretti (Mazzio 2014)

4. Digital Condition
The word ‘digital’ has of course carried a great deal of
rhetorical and symbolic capital in recent years,
particularly when paired with ‘humanities’, for the
‘addition of the high-powered adjective to the long-
suffering noun’ can suggest to many, as Adam Kirsh has
put it, ‘nothing less than an epoch in human history’
(2014). Generalizations about ‘digital’ technology no less
than numbers themselves as constituent elements of
humanistic practices, institutions and systems of
organization are often hyperbolic, an overstatement of a
case that we are just beginning to understand. (Mazzio
2014)

5. What is so refreshing about this volume is that it
represents a new generation of scholars working
within historical and literary contexts to come to
grips, in various ways, not with a ‘digital condition’
of early modernity or of the present moment, but
with varied and often surprising conditions of digits,
by which I index both senses of the term ‘digits’,
alluding to numbers and fingers, symbols of
quantity that might also lead us back to our own
writing, reading, and working hands. (Mazzio 2014)

6. The meaning of literature
What we have called "literature" is part of an
environment in which we are able so to name it. I
argue, here and elsewhere, that that environment
developed out of a moment of fairly abrupt
discursive transformation occurring in Western
Europe during some of the years traditionally
known as the Renaissance, between roughly the
mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth.
The transformation was consolidated by the turn of
the latter century, or at least by the end of the first
two decades of the eighteenth. (Reiss 1992)

7. The future of literature
This is not to deny further development, but to
claim that there were no more immediate
fundamental changes of assumption. By and
large the discursive class by then dominant
(what I call the analytico‐ referential) stayed so
at least to the end of the nineteenth century.
Despite increasing unease, it may be thought
largely to be so still. (Reiss 1992)

8. The power of numbers
• Early Modern Period, when Hindu-Arabic
computational practices that helped in shaping
the analytico-referential discourse.
• At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the
digital revolution, that started with Turing's
universal machine in the 1930s, that changed the
relationship between natural languages and
formalized languages, introducing the concept of
a machine language as a way to communicate
with inorganic matter.

9. The rise and fall of Literature
• Literature in the modern sense emerged in the
sixteenth-seventeenth century, from within an
analytico-referential framework, based in its turn on
mathematical thinking.
• The analytico-referential framework became unstable
in the second half of the nineteenth century: Frege and
the problem of the foundation of arithmetics,
mathematical logic etc.
• Hence, literature itself became unstable: avantgarde,
theory of literature, formalism and the scientific notion
of literariness, Easthope's “from literary to cultural
studies” etc.

10. Distant Writing
By the mid-sixteenth century all three ideas of
writing turned in fact on a perception of "distance."
In each case, writing was clearly divided from
religious, social, ethical, and political activity. The
affirmative force of poetic distance was entire.
Poets and their poetry were not, and could not be,
integral to the body politic. That was often given as
the reason why it was so difficult to justify writing
in the vernacular: while Latin, said Juan de Valdés
(sometime between 1534 and 1541) was the
language of "arte" and books, Castilian was "por
uso," for everyday use. (Reiss 1992)

11. Writing and Method
The context out of which literature was invented
was thus wide. Its urge came, not unexpectedly, as
much from the argument of theory as from the
dismay of practice. That is the light in which one
should consider, for example, the implication of
Bacon's argument placing "writing" and what he
called experientia literata at the very foundation of
all right and legitimate knowledge […] For Bacon,
ordered writing was the basis of all and any right
method. In turn, method was the basis of legitimate
knowledge of nature and stability and growth in a
healthy political society. (Reiss 1992)

12. Turing’s practical machines
One of the idea on which this research is based is
that Turing’s experiences after the invention of the
Universal Machine shifted his attention towards
building machines that emulated different human
skills and abilities, such as learning, the possibility
to make mistakes and correct them, a random
choice etc. The attention to these new research
topics […] meant moving away from the questions
addressed in the studies on foundation of
mathematics, (Numerico 2005)

13. Against Distant Reading 1
In contrast to the scale of textual meta-analysis enabled
by the digital humanities, the essays in this volume arrive
at generalizations through the careful examination of the
numerical world of a single author or printer, within a
single text, […] — all of which depend upon acute powers
of close reading and […] microscopic analysis in which
details of history, texts and cultures come to matter as
the texture of context becomes enlarged, more
granulated. […] It counter a new economy of scale offered
by digital manipulations that enable the kinds of ‘distance
reading’ through graphs, maps and trees, aligning
information in new ways to arrive at conclusions
otherwise difficult to detect. (Mazzio 2014)

14. Against Digital Reading 2
I have also learned tremendously from the provocations
of Franco Moretti and the vast global history of the novel
that he has launched, which has had a remarkably
salutary effect on breaking down the nation-based
parochialism on novel studies. However, Moretti has no
time for the oriental tale of for the critical interpretation
of individual fictions, except as examplary of very large
trends that can be followed through their tropological
and formal analysis, and this is of a piece with his grand
narrative of intellectual diffusion with Europe as the core.
(Aramavudan 2012)

15. Thank You!
• guzzettg@gmail.com
• @giorgioguzzetta
• Blog: http://futuread.hypotheses.org/
• http://giorgioguzzettacv.wikispaces.com/
WORK IN PROGRESS:
• http://digitalliterarylab.wikispaces.com/
• http://historyofhumanitiescomputing.wikispace
s.com/