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Loss Pequeño Glazier sees print and electronic text on a continuum, arguing that “innovative literature” in both media “has explored the conditions that determine ... the procedures, processes, and crossed paths of meaning-making, meaning-making as constituting the ‘meaning’”. As Glazier points out, print writers have also explored the materiality of the medium, from the typewriter poems of Ian Hamilton Finlay to the mimeo movement and concrete poetry. The specificity of digital media, he implies, lies in its distinctive materiality: “materiality is key to understanding innovative practice.”

The materiality of digital text increases the writer’s sense that writing is not merely the fashioning of a verbal abstraction but a concrete act of making, a production that involves manual manipulation, proprioceptive projection, kinesthetic involvement, and other physical senses.