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What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that
literary texts—and the material remains of authorship,
publishing, and reading—are reduced to bitstreams, strings of
digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations
for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary
texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats,
and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the "text"
of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun? These
are the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in
Bitstreams, a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the
intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary
archives. With an intimate narrative style that belies the cold
technics of computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the
library where all access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is mediated by
digital technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's
Macintosh; to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost
"HyperPoems" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into
the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio
reimagining the future of the codex. A persistent theme is that
bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing—are never
self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of
particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities
are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake
the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.
What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that
literary texts-and the material remains of authorship, publishing,
and reading-are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and
zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history,
textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are
distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and
networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the "text" of
our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun? These are
the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Bitstreams,
a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the intersection
of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. With an
intimate narrative style that belies the cold technics of
computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the library where all
access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is mediated by digital
technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's Macintosh;
to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost
"HyperPoems" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into
the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio
reimagining the future of the codex. A persistent theme is that
bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing-are never
self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of
particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities
are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake
the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.
A leading voice in technology studies shares a collection of
essential essays on the preservation of software and history of
games. Since the early 2000s, Henry Lowood has led or had a key
role in numerous initiatives devoted to the preservation and
documentation of virtual worlds, digital games, and interactive
simulations, establishing himself as a major scholar in the field
of game studies. His voluminous writings have tackled subject
matter spanning the history of game design and development,
military simulation, table-top games, machinima, e-sports,
wargaming, and historical software archives and collection
development. Replayed consolidates Lowood's far-flung and
significant publications on these subjects into a single volume.
The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as
the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg's print
shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the
period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word
processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a
marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The
product of years of archival research and numerous interviews
conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary
history of word processing. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the
interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with
the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of
anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a
better typewriter or something more? How did it change our
understanding of writing? Track Changes balances the stories of
individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly
ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular
instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we
discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word
processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of
both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace
the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in
fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship
and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may
consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.
A new "textual studies" and archival approach to the investigation
of works of new media and electronic literature that applies
techniques of computer forensics to conduct media-specific readings
of William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa," Michael Joyce's
Afternoon, and the interactive game Mystery House. In Mechanisms,
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing
against the textual and technological primitives that govern
writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media:
erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms
is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to
storage-the hard drive in particular-arguing that understanding the
affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new
media. Drawing a distinction between "forensic materiality" and
"formal materiality," Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics
techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities
discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects
and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics
encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions,
platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these
techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of
new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of
personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House,
Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic
poem "Agrippa."
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