In addition to hypertext, several aspects of humanities computing derive from the virtuality of its texts. First of all, the ease of manipulating individual alphanumeric symbols facilitates word processing. Simple word processing in turn has, ironically, made vastly easier the old-fashioned job of traditional scholarly editing-the creation of reliable, supposedly authoritative texts from manuscripts or published books-at a time when the very notion of such single, unitary, univocal texts may be changing or disappearing. We find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to see the book as unnatural, as a near-miraculous technological innovation and not as something intrinsically and inevitably human. We have, to use Derridean terms, decentered the book. (Landow 24-25)
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