Alas, the computer makes it just as easy to discard information as it does to save it. Consider, for example, the mystery surrounding the first e-mail message , which was sent in 1964. Because no one saved it, no one knows exactly who sent it. Online conferencing systems like the WELL stand as a completely new source of information about the work of writers and other historically important persons. The conference includes his comments, and those of hundreds of other participants, on subjects related to his work.
Computers also make new kinds of remarkably detailed textual analysis possible.
Five months before a forensic document examiner compared handwriting samples to determine that Joe Klein was indeed the author of Primary Colors , Vassar literature professor Don Foster 's computer, analyzing adverb choices, colon propensity, thematic similarities, and a variety of other lexical signatures, had reached the same conclusion. Indeed, computers are such cold, powerful, ostensibly efficient machines that they seem to have little capacity for quirk or nuance. But this isn't true at all. If anything, their complexity creates more quirks and nuances than paper could ever harbor. Instead of regretting the loss of various kinds of incidental information that were native to paper archives, perhaps scholars should look for their digital successors.