Review Essay: Paper Processors and Poetry’s Data

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press

In the first flush of text-based, web-published digital humanities projects, modernist literary studies has had a fairly thin representation, excluded largely by an accident of copyright. Literary scholarship from the Victorian period and earlier has relied on open-access text to build digital editions, digitizing, encoding, and circulating texts for scholarly and public audiences. Modernist literature’s exclusion from the public domain has, on one hand, delayed modernist scholarly participation in text encoding and web publishing.[1] And on the other, it has produced projects that work against the grain of these restrictions, focusing instead on metadata, archival context, or creative response.[2] Nevertheless, the potential resonances of modernist literature and digital humanities (DH) are many—a literary period and a scholarly field, each is preoccupied in their own ways with newness, the promise of technology, and textual experimentation. To borrow from Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum’s DH project on Mina Loy, modernist literary studies has approached DH in an “en dehors” rather than “avant garde” fashion. Modernist literary studies has taken “an outward movement, reaching outward and beyond the center” instead of a direct attack; “Upon return,” continue the co-authors, “the center is transformed, adjusted, and reformed by the arc of the revolution.”[3]

Two recently published books suggest that DH and modernist literary studies have circled around one another in a transformational way. DH methodologies and critical lenses have achieved a methodological sophistication in which modernist literary studies can now share. These books allow for the ways that non-textual media trouble rigid textual categories just as they also adeptly integrate DH methods with long-form argumentation. Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (2025) emerges from the author’s decade of building the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA), one of those DH projects that has digitized, classified, and encoded texts from the eighteenth to early-twentieth centuries in order to trace the pedagogical and conceptual histories of poetry. Along the way, Martin’s careful intellectual consideration of the archive reveals how rigid textuality only imperfectly accounts for the multimedia history of poetry on the page. Alex Christie’s Paper Processors: Modern Manuscripts and the Pre-History of Digital Humanities (2024) considers the writing practices of modernist authors as engaging with proto-digital writing methods legible in their manuscripts and echoed in their historical contexts; these experimentations do not represent a direct line of development to contemporary DH, but they do offer an imaginative alternative, a possible future technological world that might have emerged from modernist proto-digitality and that DH might still learn from today.

These books converge in their concern with the materiality and labor of the DH and its relationship to text and media that are often poorly represented by the text-based technologies developed for the early eras of DH. However, instead of speaking directly to one another, they circle common concerns. Together, they demonstrate that a methodologically sophisticated combination of DH and literary studies can work across the scales of interpretation, archival research, and historical context and can do so through the form of the book or the project.

Martin advances a three-part argument that focuses on the ways the logic of contemporary data—in this case, the practices of encoding, classification, and description—is continuous with the data-like practices of the theorists of poetry of the last three centuries, which “allowed readers, and continues to allow readers, to interpret poetry’s data as a synecdoche of literary and aesthetic value” (4). First, literary disciplines have yet to account for the ways that historical data structures shape the literary and linguistic history of poetry and how, in turn, that history shapes how it is taught now. Second, Martin argues that scholarly researchers have been trained to theorize and critique historical mediations and knowledge infrastructures but have not turned that same training to the contemporary mediations of scholarship. And third, this technologically mediated landscape requires a shift in scholarly practice that recognizes the embeddedness of scholarly work within layers of mediation that demands collaboration and interdisciplinarity.

Martin relies on a compelling personal narrative about how she has navigated the infrastructures of contemporary academia in order to accomplish this scholarly work. In addition to illuminating the ways that the PPA came into existence and bolstering Martin’s arguments for disciplinary change, her storytelling complements the book’s structure, which emphasizes the actions and procedures of DH scholarship. Each of the six chapters advances an operation or a “how”—“Introduction [Read Me],” “How We Count [Literary],” “How We Read [Word Lists and Dictionaries],” “How We Classify [Linguistic],” “How We Express [Typographically Unique],” and “Coda [How to Cite].” Each bracketed label corresponds to a “curated collection” in the PPA, and so the classification systems of the database in turn shape the narrative of the book.

Each of the first five chapters corresponds to an Exhibit, a brief history and analysis of an object contained in the PPA. The Exhibits often illuminate a potential alternate trajectory of literary history through the lens of prosody. For instance, “Exhibit B: Art” features Edward Bysshe’s poetry handbook, The Art of English Poetry (1702). A hybrid form that has proven difficult to classify within the PPA, Bysshe’s handbook enters into the debates surrounding the rules of English poetry, including imported aspects of poetic form from French and Italian that poets and critics since have taken issue with since (the heroic couplet, for instance). But as Martin suggests, the importance of Bysshe’s volume is in its repetition through pedagogy and its reverberation through prosody since; “it was teachable,” she writes, “and so it was taught” (52–3). Exhibits also illuminate the broad scale of metadata. In “Exhibit C: Table,” Martin demonstrates how objects in the PPA also engage the history of prosody at the scale of historiographical classifications themselves. The graph, “Tabular View of the Science of Elocution,” in S. S. Hammill’s The Science of Elocution (1872), represents for Martin a metadata-oriented approach that resonates through the data-building work of the PPA:

we might think of it as an attempt at categorization among many, a trajectory of poetry in performance told through the development not of poetry’s data but of poetry’s metadata. Hammill’s attempts to classify, organize, and present a history for the development of elocution in a tabular view tips it into the history of information visualization. (79)

Martin’s suggestion that Hammill is concerned with metadata resonates through the rest of the book, in which Martin makes a compelling case for the role of metadata as an interpretive choice that seeks to contextualize and preserve cultural objects that would otherwise be lost (chapter three), and in which she critiques in direct and indirect ways the decontextualized logics of modern search and Google’s “democratized” knowledges (chapters two and four).

The exhibits work at opposing scales. On one hand, the repeatable and repeated atomic unit of poetic line connects the prosodic texts of the eighteenth century to the classification systems of contemporary DH projects. And on the other, the history of prosody also engages the scale of metadata as an historiographical exercise, one that is reconsidered and debated in the metadata contained in the PPA and the metadata created by the PPA. The interrelations among the use of prosodic rules, the classification of hybrid texts, and the resonances of historical poetry through contemporary media are at the core of Martin’s analysis.

Christie, by contrast, undertakes a more traditionally analytic engagement with archival materials. Through the lens of historical technologies and the habits of mind they permit in authors, Christie combines archival analysis with close reading in the service of scholarly argument, uncovering a “grander and more surprising story to be told about the materiality of literary creation and the forgotten antecedents to the way we write today” (2). This story is that of “paper processing,” in which authors engage procedurally with technical media as they understood them, a set of practices that parallels a contemporary concern with the processing of text on a computer, whether the cut-and-paste operations of word processing or the statistical analysis of text in algorithmic analysis. Christie’s analysis is shaped by a coherent amalgam of a range of theoretical perspectives that DH has developed—from genetic text encoding to media specificity, media archaeology, and database aesthetics.

Paper Processors is divided into two sections, “Analog: Dreams of a Lost Past” and “Digital: Anxious in the Now,” that articulate the distinct logics of modernist technologies before and after the emergence of digital technologies. In “Analog,” Christie focuses on technologies that make meaning by analogy, by measuring, capturing, or representing some phenomenon in the material world by material means. Christie provides examples like daguerreotype photography, in which light rays are captured on a physical plate, chemical reactions creating an analog for light, and the phonograph record, in which sound waves find an analog in a form of writing on a wax cylinder or disk. The materiality of analog media resulted in a cultural perception of media as “magic gateways to a previously inaccessible layer of the material world: the past,” a cultural pattern built on the material realities of analog media (33).

The two chapters in this section feature Raymond Roussel and Marcel Proust. Chapter two, “Writing Rules: Raymond Roussel’s Impressions” demonstrates that Roussel created the spectacular vignettes of machines in his novels through a series of generative wordplay operations, a compositional “manufacture” that he hoped would bring him the glory of Napoleon and the financial success of Méliès and Edison. Roussel’s “mechanical literature,” in turn, yokes together spectacle, capital, and spectrality in the often-macabre nature of his fantastical machines: corpses that write and are written upon; the bodies of animals demonstrating new technologies. In chapter three, “Writing Time in Marcel Proust’s Optics,” Christie focuses on Proust’s conception of fragmentary time from Jean Santeuil, his first novel unpublished in his lifetime leading eventually to À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s recombinant media logic is structured by optical media like the kaleidoscope and the magic lantern which allowed Proust to experiment with fragmented time.

In the book’s second section, “Digital,” Christie traces the shift from representation by analogy to the logic of symbolic representation by turning his attention to novelists Samuel Beckett and Mina Loy. Instead of extending human experience beyond the present moment, digital technologies calculate and generate what cannot be perceived by human senses. “Now,” writes Christie about the emergence of digital technologies after the Second World War, “in anxious and unsettling ways, the world was coming out of media” (110).

Chapter four, “Calculating Humans: Samuel Beckett’s Encipherment,” argues that Beckett’s Trilogy mirrors developments in early computing by operating as a “spybook,” in which information is encrypted and decrypted (117). In Beckett’s novels, “traces can be refashioned to produce and transform accounts of their sources, thereby reconstructing imaginary and unreal representations of an external subject” (122). Beckett’s recombination is distinct from that of authors in the “Analog” section, as it demonstrates subjects emerging from media within a moment in technological history deeply concerned with the relationship of enciphering and deciphering to possible truths. In “In Medium Sight: Mina Loy’s Vision,” Christie concentrates on Loy’s manuscript Insel, written and continuously revised from 1933 to just before her death in 1966 and unpublished in Loy’s lifetime. The protagonist, Mrs. Jones, describes receiving transmissions from the subject of her writing, Insel, as “infinitesimal currents,” or “views received as telegraphic code,” signalling information beyond human perception (154). In the narrative, the psychic visions are converted into manuscript; in Loy’s surviving manuscripts, too, they become “crypto-spiritualist art objects” (155). Loy’s “digital mediumship” “disrupts [the novel’s] sense of ontological unity and agency altogether . . . [providing] a way to write beyond the limitations of the individual author” (162).

I questioned the structure of the volume at first. There is a temporal divide between, on one hand, Roussel and Proust writing primarily from the late-nineteenth century to the years before World War I, and, on the other, Beckett and Loy writing primarily during and after World War II. None of the featured novelists write primarily in the interwar period and the bulk of what we call the modernist period. Given the wealth of scholarship on the technologies of this period, it would seem timely for Christie to ask how writers in the middle of modernism might have engaged in paper processing.[4] However, the book-ended structure suggests that later authors reach across the division of time to earlier authors. For instance, Beckett’s digital recombination is also a deformation of Proust’s optics, extending “Proust’s kaleidoscope to its technical limit” (119). Through Loy, Christie stages the gender politics of women as receptive vessels for the signals of new technologies, positioning “women as vehicles for male experiments in human perception” (158). Loy provides a direct critique of Proust’s erotic optics as well as Roussel’s desire to use technological spiritualism to gain masculinist mastery.

Christie does not explicitly call attention to this divide as an important structural dimension of the book, yet it is among the book’s strengths. What is more, it mirrors the argument that he makes about DH, too. Rather than seeing modernist literary experimentation in a linear progression toward DH, the current moment of DH has much to learn by looking at the media experimentation of the modernist period, to see what DH could have looked like, what could have developed over the arc of time.

****

Each of these books articulates a distinct arc of development for contemporary digital literary humanities. Poetry’s Data is a history of people within institutional and technological structures, including Martin herself, as much as it is a history of poetry. In contrast, Christie’s Paper Processors most strongly joins the tradition of media archaeology, a branch of media studies in which engagement with old media opens up the possibility to address the imaginative potential that old media held, whether or not the media futures they imagined ever came to pass.

The two books together also serve as a reminder of just how recent many of our academic formations are. Martin makes this argument only obliquely, drawing on John Guillory’s Professing Criticism in the footnotes as a reminder of the post–World War II rewriting of literary criticism (48). It is in the context of this rewriting that scholars now considered the progenitors of DH, Josephine Miles and Fr. Roberta Busa, were undertaking their respective projects, the Dryden concordance and the Index Thomasticus. The stories of these projects rhyme with those of so many large DH projects today: each collaborated with women graduate students and “human computers” (in Busa’s case women who went uncredited until 2016), and each eventually used IBM technologies as the projects grew in scope.[5] For Christie, modernist authors “pioneered experimental processing methods from which today’s DH may still learn a great deal,” and among those lessons is avoiding the “perverse secretarialism” of modernist women in DH (189, 159). I would add to this history the role of the post-war generation of scholars who established modernist literary studies. Christie provides one surprising example from Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse (1987), in which Kenner argues that Beckett’s Trilogy foreshadows the logical operations of FORTRAN, one of the first programming languages for numeric computation developed by IBM and still in use today. The media archeological imaginary was available to Kenner in 1987 looking back to the early 1950s, and the conditions of collaborative DH projects, for good and for ill, were in play in the very moment that modernist literary studies formed.

Together, Martin and Christie suggest that the story that modernist literary scholars may tell ourselves about the encroachment of DH is an ahistorical one. Indeed, among Martin’s arguments is her self-aware discussion of the primacy of the monograph and the under-recognition of projects like the PPA. As she puts it, “I wrote this book because the technical project of the Princeton Prosody Archive . . . does not count and is not legible to or properly valued by the very people who might use the PPA, people who assume that it is a service and not scholarship” (167). Martin joins many other DH scholars in arguing that the persistent privileging of the monograph denigrates much of the collective intellectual work foundational to humanities and literary scholarship—cautious, interpretive information gathering and classifying; critical navigation of information systems; preserving the cultural history that resists the homogenizing forces of changing technologies—which are revealed by contemporary technologies in a way that it no longer possible for scholars to ignore. It’s a familiar argument to those of us who work in DH, and who, like Martin, often choose the compromise of producing both traditional, solo-authored close reading scholarship as well as the collective labor of digital projects.

But I am inclined to give the monograph—specifically, Martin’s and Christie’s monographs—more credit than Martin does, but not because she has offered a conventional scholarly form to explain the scholarly work of the PPA. Poetry’s Data is useful because it offers opportunity for narrative, whether the personal or the argumentative narratives that Martin and Christie construct. Martin’s “data” is as experiential as it is tabular. It is a deeply compelling demonstration of what DH argumentation actually looks like, and the sustained attention of the monograph form makes it possible. Christie traces “an alternative temporality that moves away from a hegemonic linearity that demands that we see time and history as straight lines that work towards improvement and something better” (188). Claiming modernist writers as part of a lineage of DH is somewhat beside the point; claiming the imaginative potential for DH’s future is closer to the mark.

I agree with Martin that scholarly fields still have a long way to go to recognize the value of archiving, data building, and critical making projects as scholarship. And I hope that as the slow tide of change starts to see the value in these projects, that we as scholars benefit from these changes in perhaps an unexpected way: we get more books that emerge from the long, slow, and complex work of DH projects, that connect the affective and technical dimensions of scholarly work, and that see modernist media experimentation as a way of imagining different trajectories for our technologies and disciplines. We get more books like Martin’s and Christie’s.