Meta II: Digital Vellum in the Digital Scriptorium

Some people do living history—reviving older skills and material culture by reenacting Waterloo or knapping flint knives. One pleasant rainy weekend in 2012, I set my sights a little more recently and settled in for a little meditative retro-computing, circa 1962, following the ancient mode of transmission of knowledge: lecture and recitation—or rather, grace of living in historical times, lecture (here, in the French sense, reading) and transcription (or even more specifically, grace of living post-Post, lecture and reimplementation).

Fortunately, for my purposes, Dewey Val Schorre's paper¹⁰ on META II was, unlike many more recent digital artifacts, readily available as a digital scan.