Michael Sperberg-McQueen quote

Mike always has the best quotes:
“Texts cannot be put into computers. Neither can numbers. Computers can contain and operate on patterns of electronic charges, but they cannot contain numbers, which are abstract mathematical objects not electronic charges, nor texts, which are complex, abstract cultural and linguistic objects.”
Michael Sperberg-McQueen, ‘Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding with examples from Medieval Texts.’ Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6/1 (1991): 34-46. (34)
This can be expanded for use with all kinds of computing technologies: remembering the distinctions between the computer and what we construct on/with it.

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