So if the tactic is imminent to the network, or perhaps more fundamentally, if noise is imminent to communication, [6] interoperability becomes a key concept in viral operations, as it acts as both the virus' unique source of power and its key source of frustration. Arguably, among those most frustrated by this interoperability is the digital humanities researcher, who is confronted with many difficulties in trying to deal with the slipperiness of her object of study. For one, just as the computer virus is able to propagate, mutate, and transgress across platforms, the concept of "virality" itself has also been accorded its own sort of meme-like mobility across university departments, wandering from epidemiology and artificial life research, to information security and science and technology studies, to critical theory and cultural studies. Given the sheer breadth and continuing life of these contagious ideas, the multi-disciplinary literature surrounding the virus presents a serious challenge to a researcher trained in the humanities, as the ability to synthesize, classify, and master such knowledge requires its own virus-like sense of mobility and mutability. To this problem of scope and disciplinarity, further methodological difficulties are added by the virus' virtuoso powers of secrecy and deception. For if the traditional cultural theorist is trained in the rigorous study of signs on visible surfaces like screens and pages, how is she able to deal with an "object" which most often lies in wait within the machinic substrate, wholly invisible to the user's "naked eye," until it is too late? Thus, if the virus remains incredibly difficult to track and quarantine into some sort of static, territorialized space like the archive, it is only because its interoperability affords it a sort of transmedial character: traversing boundaries and interfaces at many layers and scales, from the molecular to the national, from biology to computer science, and from human to machinic perception.

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