The focus of this special issue of Interface Critique is the contestation of this concept of the interface as a mere threshold to a dematerialized data-world. To do so, however, we do not begin with the desktop, but with one fundamental object that lies upon its surface: the book. Within the humanities, the book holds a deeply historical place as one of the most important objects and products of research. It is the interface for the exchange of authors and readers, the re-shaper of riveting oral stories into scrawled page-turners, the transformer of conversation into records and scripts. At the same time, when the materiality of the book comes to the foreground, the metaphor of ‘reading a book’ turns out to be literal as well – the text is also resident in, and not extricable from, its physical engendering. A text is not a dematerialized being, it is not pure content but inextricable from its form; a text resides in the interface between content and form. The contributions of this issue widely explore how interfaces between bodies and texts have been digitally revolutionised, from the engagement of researchers with antique Arabic literature and Greek philosophy through manuscripts, to the engagement of impoverished people with public infrastructure through the information inscribed on food ration cards in contemporary India. They show how the digital transformation of text from analogue to digital formats conditions modes of access, thus transforming embodied experiences and – in turn – the form/content relation of the texts themselves.
