ABSTRACT Title of Document: HACKING LITERATURE: READING ANALOG TEXTS IN A DIGITAL AGE Aaron Dinin, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Martha Nell Smith, Department of English Evangelists of the digital age, in the immediacy of its adolescence, often describe digital technologies as “revolutionary” (e.g. “the digital revolution”) and as having a world-changing impact on human cultural interactions. However, by considering digital media from a temporally scaled vantage point spanning thousands of years, Hacking Literature proposes ways in which the digital age might also be introducing “world-saming” technologies that are as likely to reinstantiate cultural norms as they are to create new ones. Hacking Literature finds evidence for its arguments by considering examples of similar technological innovations prevalent in “revolutionary” technologies of information storage and dissemination: that of differently mediated literary texts. Using arguably iconic examples from Homer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Dickinson (an epic, a drama, a novel, and poetry), and creating analogies between those texts and, respectively, the Linux kernel, Internet security protocols, the history of the World Wide Web, and the world’s most successful blogging engine, Hacking Literature describes ways in which literary media and digital media appear to undergo similar kinds of technological transformations. The project then analyzes these similarities to suggest possible opportunities for using software development concepts as entry points for literary analysis, as critical lenses for reading that meld technology and humanities. HACKING LITERATURE: READING ANALOG TEXTS IN A DIGITAL AGE By Aaron Dinin Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Professor Martha Nell Smith, Chair Professor Marilee Lindemann Professor Jason Rudy Professor Melanie Kill Professor Ben Bederson © Copyright by Aaron Dinin 2014 Table of Contents Table of Contents................................................................................................ii Introduction: Connecting Technologies …………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1: I View the Body Electric ……………………………………………………….. 16 Chapter 2: Developing the Homeric Question ………………………………………… 60 Chapter 3: There Is No World Without Verona Firewalls ……………………..… 117 Chapter 4: This Particular World Wide Web ………………………………………… 163 Chapter 5: Emily Dickinson, Software Engineer …………………………………… 208 Conclusion: Metaphor as Technology …………………………………………………. 260 Appendices ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 265 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………..…… 266 ii Introduction: Connecting Technologies The following project is the result of my uncommon combination of professions. One of those professions – the one directly spurring this project – is the study of English literary texts and the surrounding scholarship. The second profession is the building of complex web software applications. In other words, I am both an English doctoral student working, learning, and collaborating in an academic setting, and I am a software engineer working, learning, and collaborating in a corporate setting. I acknowledge my work in two professions rarely associated with each other because, despite claims to the contrary, the two fields do not often collaborate, or at least not in the ways I will emphasize. I do not mean that people in academic humanities disciplines do not know how to code software, since people like Matt Kirschenbaum, Steven Ramsay, Adeline Koh, Natalia Cecire, and Franco Moretti, among many others, regularly work in, discuss, and build code-based projects. Instead, in nearly a decade of work within the two professions, I rarely encounter other people who are similarly committed to working in the corporate world of software development. Instead, often when I explain my background, I encounter responses of surprise. People either wonder why a developer is also pursuing a PhD in English, or they wonder why someone pursuing a PhD in English also works as a developer. The answer, my experience has taught me, is that the knowledge used in the two fields is not nearly as dissimilar as might at first appear. Specifically, the knowledge I have acquired as a developer has made me a 1 better reader of literary texts, and the skills cultivated while analyzing literary texts have helped me become a better developer. At its simplest, this project expands on these overlaps. But their existence also suggests a somewhat overlooked relationship between the two professions and the opportunities available in encouraging more collaboration of the kinds described here and more sharing of knowledge. Perhaps the most appropriate way for me to begin exploring the relationship between software development and academic English studies is to start with the usual explanation I give when asked why I study both software and literature. Language – I like to remind those who ask – makes use of technologies that help users create, store, and disseminate information. Thousands of years ago, in a time well before written and oral histories, our ancestors were doing what successful species must do: they were developing more efficient ways to survive. The difficult task of survival is easier thanks to the technologies evident in language. Among other things, language helps packs of hunters better coordinate their strategies. Language helps communities preserve and transmit learned information across generations. Language helps one person convey to another person important warnings such as, “Watch out for the pointy thing on that animal’s head,” which limits the number of times communities need to learn fatal lessons. In other words, in these examples language serves as a survival tool and, in that regard, might be considered a technology. Humans have been using language for so long that the majority of the world’s population is capable of creating, storing, and disseminating 2 information by customizing linguistic structures with a relatively high level of complexity. Our comfort deploying language has become so complete that, even though many people are aware that language is artificial, most will rarely contemplate language during their day-to-day usage of it as anything but natural and “human.” In contrast, software-based mechanisms of information storage and dissemination are so new that only a small portion of the population knows how to code custom programmatic structures, and most software users regard programming languages as artificial and unnatural. But the act of coding can serve a purpose similar to the act of writing: as tools that help store and disseminate information. When given this context, not only does the chasm between literary scholarship and software development shrink, opportunities emerge that have not been recognized as widely as would be beneficial to both fields. Since coding and writing can enable similar social purposes, studying literary texts should be able to contribute to a knowledge of coding, and studying programmatic software should be able to contribute to a knowledge of writing. Because of this relationship, my explanation for why I both code and study literary texts is this: Knowing how to code informs and improves my ability to study literature, and studying literature informs and improves my ability to code digital applications. What follows in the coming chapters are a series of examples showing deployments of software and literature suggesting the kinds of developmental, structural, and cultural similarities that might allow knowledge of each discipline to inform and improve study of the other. The project’s goal is to 3 leverage those examined similarities in order to suggest the kinds of critical and procedural methodologies that such comparisons might allow. Because the primary audience of this project is not the software development community (though I encourage them to read it), I will not focus on possible ways in which the study of literary texts can improve one’s ability to code. Instead, this project will present similarities between literary texts and software development concepts in order to demonstrate opportunities for literary analysis. Appreciating the potential of software development concepts in relation to the study of literary objects can be difficult when limiting the temporal context for the study to the relatively small timescape of the digital age. However, “Scal[ing] enlargement along the temporal axis,” as Wai Chee Dimock encourages in Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time: Changes our very sense of the connectedness among human beings. It also suggests that different investigative contexts might need different time frames, with no single one serving as an all-purpose metric. Some historical phenomena need large- scale analysis. They need hundreds, thousands, or even billions of years to be recognized for what they are: phenomena constituted by their temporal extension, with a genealogy much longer than the life span of any biological individual, and interesting for just that reason. A shorter time frame would have 4 cut them off in midstream, would have obscured the fact of their cumulation.1 Dimock is arguing that an appropriate understanding of some phenomena is impossible within the context of the relatively short contextual spans in which most people normally study them (what she describes as a “biological” life span). Instead, they require a temporal frame of analysis that can span centuries or millennia. Hacking Literature wonders if an example of one such historical phenomenon that can benefit from Dimock’s concept of “deep time” analysis are the evolutions of literature in different media. By expanding the temporal scale for considering information technologies from the miniscule immediacy of current digital trends into the much larger scale of literary storage and transmission technologies, digital technologies can be more thoroughly studied, appreciated, and leveraged as tools of analysis. Instead of studying technological fads likely to become little more than cautionary tales or cultural punch lines within a decade,2 contextualizing digital media within a temporal scale spanning civilizations can augment the sense that digital technologies are just as likely to be revolutionarily world “saming” as they are to be revolutionarily world changing. Recognizing that new technologies – in whatever forms they arrive – are as capable of reinstantiating cultural 1  Dimock,  Wai  Chee.  Through  Other  Continents:  American  Literature  Across  Deep  Time.  Princeton,   NJ:  Princeton  University  Press,  2008.  L  87   2  As  N.  Katherine  Hayles  notes  in  the  prologue  of  My  Mother  Was  a  Computer:  Digital  Subjects  and   Literary  Texts,  the  evolutionary  pace  of  digital  technologies  can  make  serious  critical  discussion   of  popular  digital  objects  a  shortsighted  exercise  (1-­‐11,  esp.  2).  Even  as  I  write  this  document,  I   find  myself  wondering  which  of  my  statements  about  digital  technologies  will,  within  a  few   years,  seem  dated  and  obsolete.   5