Prologue: Writings on a wall

Can digital miracles be formalized? What sort of effects does formalization have on the performance of digital miracles? The migration of our dominant written culture onto social media is enabling the digital codification of existing bodies of miraculous cures, allowing them to take on network-like expressions. This digital codification through the written word is an instance of the formalization of digital record-keeping and record-making within the structuring and formatting of social media data architecture. The digitality of writing lends itself to a swathe of computational manipulation, which has been developed both in response to and as a historical result of late 20th-century computationalism. By examining this digitality firstly through a historical lens and subsequently using the tools that have been developed as part of our computational zeitgeist, we can begin to examine how written networks of miracle cures on social media might differ from – or resemble – pre-digital organizations and enactments of miracles.