Surrogate

Historical scholarship in literary studies is increasingly dependent upon digital objects that stand as substitutes for printed or manuscript material. Digital surrogates often mimic the functionalities of codices and other material formats, ostensibly to reproduce the experience of handling the originals while taking advantage of the vastly different cognitive and representational possibilities afforded by the new medium. There has been much theorizing since McLuhan (1964) on how new media contain the old: indeed we might say scholars involved in historicist criticism are increasingly making digital simulacra into effigies of print. Archives of digitized print materials do not pretend to replace