Allison Parrish is a computer programer, educator, and poet whose work deals with the materiality of language. With a background in both the formal study of language (she received her BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley) and years of experience as a software developer, Parrish's work has lead her to explore words not only as symbols but also as objects in their own right, teasing the boundaries between medium and message to ask questions about how communication happens in a digital context. Electronic media open up entirely new possibilities for the manipulation of language, but they also lay bare some of the thorniest problems of textual interpretation. If we are writing for other humans we can assume a baseline understanding of how language works, an understanding which computers still do not share. If this seems abstract, consider the way that language comes to be represented as a text file in a computer: words are compressed into ASCII characters and stored as bits on a hard drive; the fundaments of human communication, having emerged out of obscure prehistory and evolved for centuries, accumulating layers of connotation and nuance along the way, are now encoded as tiny electrical charges in a matrix of transistors.