Description: Cryptology, the science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the study of languages, are typically understood as separate domains. But Brian Lennon contends that computing's humanistic applications, no less than its technical ones, are marked by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence.
Brief description: Brian Lennon is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.
Review Quotes: Passwords is a fascinating book. What is especially impressive is the author's deft and knowing engagements with both the long histories of computational text processing and the many discourses that make up literary philology. This is just the sort of work that the present mania for the digital demands, and yet books that actually live up to those demands are few and far between. Lennon is one of the few scholars who is even capable of managing that feat, and he does so here with style and erudition.--David Golumbia, Virginia Commonwealth University