____

A digital text does not exist anywhere in the computer or in the networked system in the precise form it acquires when displayed on screen. As processes, digital texts exhibit sensitive dependence on temporal and spatial contexts, to say nothing of their absolute dependence on specific hardware and software configurations. Changes of some kind may happen every time the text is performed, from small differences in timing to major glitches when a suddenly obsolete program tries to run on a platform that has not maintained backward compatibility.