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Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) inaugurated a decade of inquiries into the effects of the digitalization of culture and its transcoding, that is, its translation into other formats. Until then, literature had been identified with book culture so strongly that, for centuries, it was institutionalized as a practice of the book, even if printing is only a stage in the history of textual transmission.
In The Nature of the Book (1998), Adrian Johns reminds us that until the middle of the 18th- century the book was an unstable object, with
Shakespeare’s first folio including not only more than six hundred typefaces, but also numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies regarding its spelling, punctuation, divisions, arrangement, proofing and page configurations. As a result, readers had to make critical decisions regarding particular manuscripts, their origin, identity, consistency and trustworthiness (31-32).
DOI 10.33234/SSR.17.6
