ABSTRACT
This bit of academic lore reminds us that conventions of scholarly work appropriate for a doctoral thesis have evolved and changed over time. Moreover, we see that the standards and practices of dissertation writing as we now know them must prima facie bear the mark of at least one major technological rupture, that of the mechanical typewriter, which entered into common usage not very long after Whiton penned his longhand opus. The severe strictures governing margins, spacing, page numbering, and so forth engrained in every doctoral candidate are a direct outgrowth of the new-and as Friedrich Kittler and others have observed, industrial-control over writing space that the typewriter enabled. As Scott Bukatman (1993) puts it, “The typewriter…makes potential cyborgs of us all in our attempt to match its machine-tooled perfection.” Thus, the typewriter, one could argue, has shaped the form and even the substance of scholarly work for much of the twentieth century.
