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This chapter traces the cloud of digital data back to the data centers that store them. For security reasons, a number of data centers are repurposed Cold War military bunkers, suggesting that a military rationale for a bunker, to defend an area of territory, has re-entered the realm of data. By dividing networks into logical zones of inside and outside, these security infrastructures raise the specter of attack from those that might be ‘outside’ to network society, such as Chinese hackers or Iranian cyberwarfare specialists. By revisiting Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, this chapter further suggests that the specter of a disaster that the cloud continually raises also carries within it a temporality of a user’s imagined death. This temporality animates a recent series of digital preservation projects, such as the ‘Digital Genome’ time capsule, intended to survive the “death of the digital.”

Isabel Galina is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, a research institute for bibliographic studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM. The university is also home to the Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico’s national library. Isabel Galina discusses the emergence of digital humanities and her views on how DH works within this particular structure and related issues to do with understanding national bibliographical collections in the digital age, in particular regarding e-legal deposit and digital preservation. She discusses the difficulties in identifying, selecting, and incorporating born-digital materials. In the interview, Isabel Galina also describes how she got involved in DH, the creation of the Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD), and other DH developments in Mexico and Latin America. Finally, the conversation examines university and government support for DH as well as a look at DH works in Mexico in collaboration with other countries, and in particular hosting the international Digital Humanities conference in Mexico City in 2018.

This book has argued that what we have today in terms of literary and textual material and computational power represents a moment of revolution for literary studies. It has discussed the limitations of close reading as a solitary method of literary inquiry, proposing instead large-scale text analysis and text mining via the macroanalytic approach for contextualizing our study of individual works of literature. In conclusion, the author offers a few thoughts on digital preservation, orphan works, and future prospects for macroanalysis. He cites the challenges that must be addressed with respect to digitization of texts, focusing in particular on the legal issues surrounding copyright and how they force scholars wishing to study the literary record at scale to ignore almost everything that has been published since 1923. He also cites examples of positive developments in this regard, including the HathiTrust digital repository and the Book Genome Project.