ABSTRACT
The age of print codified a set of systems and machines for making and thinking about text: a construction based on a formalist understanding of words, assembled into lines, assembled into pages. Conceptual model of the text underpins many of our most basic reading, interpretive, and indeed computational approaches, both analytic and synthetic. These features make Unix a machine built of text. It is phenomenally useful for text processing, because text processing is at its very heart. Its tools can be used to perform a variety of text processing tasks. In the Text Processing Techniques & Traditions course at Digital Humanities Summer Institute moving back and forth between these mode(l)s, in a demonstration that texts are more than any one thing, greater than any one embodiment, while remaining necessarily embodied. In Unix, a text is a file: a linear sequence of characters and words in a discrete package, with a beginning and an end.
