I had a little bit of intimate but impersonal contact with Lawrence Ferlinghetti: the USC special collections library has the notes of his doctoral dissertation, which if I remember correctly was about the theme of the city in poetry/literature. I think he wrote it in Paris, but it was mostly in English. It was on small note cards in pencil and I remember that I had to read it in the presence of the librarian. That was way before I was interested in computers but it's interesting as a contrast. There's a lot of amazing writing online and the ease of putting stuff online makes it possible to see rough thoughts (e.g. tweets), but there's a lot of noise online too and reading lovingly preserved tweets from a fancy library with lots of leather and mahogany might improve the user experience.
