Whitney Trettien is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press and open access on Manifold, 2021), uses digital methods to unearth an untold history of experimental publishing with scissors and paste in seventeenth-century England. Her second book, currently in progress, traces the origins of textual encoding back to nineteenth-century experiments in telegraphy, typesetting, and weaving. She is also directing a digital project on the history of printing and publishing inside prisons, which takes Eastern State Penitentiary as its first case study.
Whitney Trettien
Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow
2024—2025 Forum on Keywords
Whitney Trettien
Associate Professor of English
From Type to .txt: The Origins of Data
For computers to function, human-legible text must be encoded as machine-manipulable data. This project asks: what concepts and material infrastructures had to be in place before this system could become thinkable? Excavating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiments in encoding language from an archive of printed books and manuscripts, patents, scientific papers, obsolete data storage systems, and machines both real and imagined, From Type to .txt tracks the uneven development of digitization in the West across four key sites: substrate, interface, platform, and format. In doing so, this project shows how the process of encoding Latin characters in a binary standard, from Jacquard’s loom to ASCII, did not cast aside movable type but instead imaginatively recast it as a tool of global telecommunications and, by extension, linguistic hegemony.