Covers and Corpus wanted! Some Digital Humanities Fragments

Covers and bindings are collapsing in the digital textual world. To begin with, the following paper argues that this is not a genuinely new situation, since all cultural Western history attests to written texts as never having been autonomous from oral discourses and versioning steps. Thenceforth – after analyzing the relationship between paper and body, relying notably on Derrida – this article will claim that we have the right and indeed, an obligation, to “capture” new covers and bindings. During the 17th century, in the lawless parts of the ocean, buccaneers realized that the right to depart was the condition for the capacity to be bound. Therefore, let us dare to depart from ancient bindings and create new boundaries.