Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History

Eve, Martin Paul (2024) Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History. Stanford Text Technologies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (In Press)

Abstract

Contemporary computing is saturated with physical metaphor and analogy. It is a virtual space of web sites, of windows, of menus, of icons, and of pointers. There is a clear reason for such a prevalence of metaphor in this world. The metaphorical trope of relation provides a way for new users to imagine how a digital interface might work with respect to its physical correlate. This has been thought as true in the digital reading world as elsewhere. Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History, however, exposes the weakness of our digital-textual, material metaphors. This book tackles and rewrites the most common assumption in UI design: that user interface designs for digital reading and writing are mentally constrained by and designed to mimic physical correlates. Conducting a new media archaeology of several digital forms – from pagination, whitespace, virtual typography, keyboards, directionality, and dimensionality, to technical protection measures – this book revises our understanding of material path dependencies, which are often erroneous or misplaced.

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