Alan Galey

Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts

If dirt is simply matter in the wrong place, it may be that digital texts can bear the marks of the world around them in ways we have yet to understand.1 In defiance of the conventional wisdom offered by hypertext theorists of the 1990s, who installed a vaguely defined immateriality into their arguments about new media, digital texts today seem to insist on being troublesome in the same ways as material documents: they may change in form and content when migrated from old formats to new ones; they manage to get themselves lost (think of White House email records); they demand embodiment and constant attention in expensive mobile devices; reading them at injudicious times even causes automobile accidents. Digital texts were supposed to be above the messiness of the world, but scholars of electronic textuality, like David Levy, have dragged them back down to earth: Digital documents are not immaterial. The marks produced on screens and on paper, the sounds generated in the airwaves, are as material as anything in our world. And the ones and zeros of our digital representations… are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letterforms on a piece of vellum. It may be true that digital representations can move around extremely quickly, that they can be copied from one storage device to another, even when they are separated by thousands of miles. But at any one moment, the bits for a particular document are somewhere real and physical.2

Introduction: Reinventing Shakespeare in the digital humanities

It is of course axiomatic that all poetry, and particularly all Shakespeare, was meant to be read aloud. So many teachers are incapable of reading Shakespeare aloud . . . that classroom renditions are doomed before they start. There is a considerable and growing library of phonograph recordings which are tremendously helpful. Gielgud, Barrymore, Ainley, and Forbes-Robertson readings of many Shakespearean parts are available. Columbia has now recorded almost a complete version of the Mercury [Theatre]’s current production of Julius Caesar. This type of material has found wide use in speech classes where, because of presumably expert instruction, it is little needed. It has failed to reach into the thousands of English classrooms struggling with murdered pentameter. This is a pity. (468)