Our last class considered the theme of the future of books as imagined from the past, but also drew together a threads running through course as a whole. Lecture slides are posted in the usual place on BB.
On Claude Shannon's mathematical model of communication and the difficulty of accounting for meaning within that model, I recommend Katherine Hayles's book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (downloadable in PDF via the U of T library catalogue).
On Leonhard Euler's use of visual models to help readers think through the Bridges of Königsberg problem, as distinct from diagramming the (non-) solution, see Stephen Ramsay's article "In Praise of Pattern" (which is relevant to our course theme in other ways as well).
For links related to Portal, including the Aperture Science website we looked at, see the reading schedule entry for last week's class.
Finally, we looked at an early appearance of the word computer in a 1613 book called The yong mans gleanings. If you'd like to look at the rest of the book (which might include more of the photographer's thumbs!) you can browse it via Early English Books Online.