Thoughts on a discussion Wed 10/29/08 at UCSC, held at Humanities I, on digital humanities projects, the need to have grain (polyphonic and -scopic?), universal access to text-image-sound, right to copy, and selectivity. I’m thinking of the physical aspects of this medium. The screen is still flat, no matter the roundness or modern styling of portable machines. The labyrinthic aspect of the machine was originally enticing: one can become fascinated by unix commands and the mysteries of the vi editor. But most applications since, while still having their duplicable and duplicitous mysteries, leave me with a strange lack of feeling. I miss the old scratching pen. “Digital”: using fingers indeed, both to leaf through pages of occasionally dog-eared codices and now to type, as I am presently doing in linear fashion. Two things are a saving grace: unicode encoding and TeX typesetting, both allowing something like an aesthetics (high falooting –sp?– word for feeling).