ABSTRACT
Close to the submission deadline for contributions to this volume, one author contacted us to convey how difficult it had been following-out the material of their essay. They expressed with some surprise how the topic had generated organically its own productive distractions and resistances, calling forth flows between obsolete and contemporary materialities and amid theoretical framings and methodologies that stretched historically. The articulation of this author’s difficulties – difficulties that in the end culminated in a wonderfully coherent and challenging piece – may be anecdotal to the overall scope of this handbook, but they are endemic to a kind of perceptual divide more broadly regarding digital labor (indeed any production labor) within the humanities.
