"The more it schizophrenizes, the better it works"

I love the way Plant's book is structured and modeled after Lovelace's professed thought patterns, "hysteria," and even her own work in translating Menabrea's work. Just as Ada's work was meant to be supplementary to Menabrea's, Plant's seems to "do what it wants" in bifurcating (in the interest of elucidation) at many points with Ada's biography. In a way, Plant's work is hypertextual, providing "footnotes without central points," commenting on and highlighting the then-overlooked importance of Lovelace's thoughts (10). The interspersal of Ada's words in Plant's text make this appear to function backwards, or mutually. Thus, Plant's writing is, more than other, less explicitly outwardly-referential works, an act of weaving. Her constant reference back to Lovelace's early work and its related texts and authors is a form of backing--she continually plays the Lovelace card, so to speak.

Plant's backing, like the construction of a narrative and teleological history, "begin[s] at the end of [the] operation" and "work[s] backwards from that point to the beginning" (26), reinscribing a feminist stance on the history of computing. Plant removes the man from the equation here, allowing Ada's work to stand alone as a text open to female commentary, and producing her own small "genderquake" (38).