How Language Became Data

How Language Became Data, investigates a history of information systems in the Middle East and their implications for the study of world literature. The book charts a shift away from cultural understandings of language (integral to models of national and comparative literature) and instead views language as data (integral to the rise of computing and information systems). With core chapters devoted to the Mediterranean telegraph cable, the Arabic typewriter, and telephone networks in the Middle East, the book argues that these various data systems offer an internationalism predicated less on distinct language traditions than on the commodification of communication infrastructures.

What happens if we acknowledge that informational approaches to language are more transnational, global, and connected than the cultural and translational models we tend to celebrate in comparative literature?  The book provides a critical counterhistory to our discipline by exploring how Orientalist philology and cryptography relate to the rise of the Turing Machine in the shared approach to language as code. In an arc that moves from Arabic philology to Morse and binary code, the book explores how data networks in the Middle East, specifically modern communications media, transform language, literacy, and translingual practices.

The book not only serves as a bridge between comparative literature and media theory, but as an argument that language and translation are inseparable from considerations of transnational media infrastructures.