"And we humbly dedicate this issue to those who have been killed by the ongoing violence in Iraq, whose numbers will never be known, whose remains may never be found, but whose traces should not be lost to history."

"Processed, parsed, and analyzed data cannot produce change in a country that has abandoned its domestic infrastructure, neglected the poor, and failed to realize the hopes and possibilities of the Civil Rights era (not to mention the Emancipation era."

"Each of the projects in this issue attempts to take seriously the significance of cultural artifacts that would otherwise be forgotten or overwhelmed by more official documents and discourses of history."

"Some pieces in this issue -- including those by Eric Faden, Perry Hoberman, and Donald Hoffman -- blur past and present, real and make believe, theory and art, playfully tweaking the borders of the user's perception."

"I am continually amazed by how easy it is to hold these two types of work apart and have come to believe that the very forms of electronic culture encourage just such a partitioning or modularity, making it hard to sustain connections across fields of knowledge."