Although designed as the first installment of my Masters thesis for the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, "ars combinatoria: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer's Denckring in Time and Place" stands alone as a meditation on the "Fivefold Thought-ring of the German Language," by G. P. Harsdörffer. This little-studied seventeeth-century text generator uses a system of nesting paper volvelles to combine syllables and letters, automatically generating words. Harsdörffer himself used it to generate poetry, and it has many links (here, literally) to Kabbalism, Stammwörter theory, and even contemporary digital poetry (as a future installment of my thesis, only hinted at in this webtext, will explicate).

Each of the letters across the top of the screen links to an essay, and each each essay acts as a discrete element. It may stand on its own or be combined (and thereby (re-)contextualized) with(in) a new intellectual, historical or cultural milieu by clicking on embedded links, exposing dimensions otherwise hidden in the traditional linear format. In the same way, by permuting the different elements, the reader can connect written texts to the culture in which they were produced, or the past and the present, without reducing one to a mere reflection of the other. Thus ars combinatoria becomes not only the subject of the essay, but a metaphor for historical, ethnographic and literary scholarship itself.

Moreover, I aim in part to show how digital technologies may be used to bring literary historians closer to the objects they study, so quotes are presented (when possible) in the original language, with a hover-over translation. Clicking on the translated text opens a Thickbox (which is what you're looking at right now) containing a high quality facsimile of the quote in its original context. In addition to making my own research processes more transparent, showing the quotes in facsimile gives, I hope, a sense of the visual aesthetic of baroque poetry and book design -- an important aspect of proteic poems that don't exist outside the combinatory potential of their mechanisms.

Finally, I want to point out that while, as a research assistant for HyperStudio, I am Digital Humanities enthusiast and love projects that allow readers to comment on or edit an author's work, this is not my goal. Actually, I want to do something rather quaint: I want to see if I can exploit the affordances of web technology to augment traditional scholarly writing. In particular, I'm interested in returning to the notion of hypertext and hyperlinking -- once a very fashionable topic that now, like the common example of Vannevar Bush's "Memex," has lost currency before realizing its full potential. Instead of "drilling into" a text vertically (as early hypertext theorists imagined), we now skim over multiple texts simultaneously and horizontally by opening tabs across the top of our browser windows. How has that changed the notion of hypertext? In other words, how can the idea of ars combinatoria create a space that reframes hypertext in a way that is meaningful for today's web?