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What does it mean to read today, now that close reading methods are joined not only by various forms of 'posthermeneutic' reading, ranging from media archaeology to the digital humanities, but by the many machine reading processes involved in digitizing text? What relationships do these new reading practices share with each other, and with earlier creative language arts such as concrete poetry and interpretive traditions such as New Criticism (to name a few examples)? If the New Critics often turned to poetry to develop their methods, what texts-what media forms-have informed these recent expansions to the concept and practice of reading? How can such expansions help us read the seemingly illegible noise of millions of digitized texts?"Literalism" explores these questions by focusing on the history of machine reading, which, I argue, has been enmeshed with the visual poetics of modern language art from its start. I combine media archaeology with semiotic analysis to show how, for all that seems mechanistic, dumb, uncritical-in a word, literal-about processes such as optical character recognition or topic modeling, machine readers read with the same attention to the graphical nature of language that also characterizes imagism and concrete poetry, as well as conceptualist wordplay and new media art. Visual poetics, then, can articulate the textuality of machine-read, mass-digitized text. Specifically, it articulates how textual noise (mis-transcriptions, typos, encoding errors, and more) is the very character of such text, not only because this noise differs from its print sources, but because it evidences how machine reading processes have converted those print sources into digital forms. I thus look to modern language art to develop new strategies for interpreting this noise to read for and alongside machines reading, and I further measure these strategies against other posthermeneutic methods to speculate on how such methods have changed what we mean by the meaning of text.My chapters develop a genealogy of machine reading processes by tracking them back to their origins in late nineteenth-century American print shops, where job printing and new text technologies like the Linotype came to emphasize the mechanical aspects of reading and writing. To this emphasis there was a correlative focus on written language's materiality, its look and statistical nature. The idea that graphic design meaningfully influences, if not controls, how one reads came to be integral for the typographical art of literary modernism and its successors, especially concrete poetry. But I also show how this idea gained traction in machine reading research, where, prior to attempts at having machines comprehend text, engineers designed machines that could simply see and store printed matter. On the one hand this makes machines highly literal, viewing words in their most basic sense as 'mere' sequences of ink patterns; but on the other, it means that, in the attention such literal mindedness pays to the graphical nature of language, it shares an abiding connection with the language art I examine.I draw out this connection by starting with the Linotype, a hot-metal printing machine that ancestrally typifies contemporary machine readers. This machine emerges at the advent of modern graphic design, and after examining the Linotype I look to the aesthetics of job printing and track how they gave rise to E-13B, the first machine-readable typeface. My survey of the expansive print artifacts marked by E-13B is followed by a discussion of the global concrete poetry movement. There, I focus on how concrete poets draw from the imagists to formulate theories of reading that digital humanists would recognize as 'non-consumptive' uses of textual datasets today. From imagism and concrete poetry I then build out to an analysis of new media artists creatively engaging with the Unicode standard's multilingual repertoire, showing how the standard's typographical conventions thwart its ability to represent the world's writing systems. Finally, "Literalism" ends with a return to corpora generated by machine readers: my conclusion examines poets Rosaire Appel, Susan Howe, and Rachel Zolf, all of whom aestheticize errors in digitization to engage with the semiotic control logics of digital archives.
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