Understanding Electronic Texts and Digital Inscription

FAIN: FA-51708-05

Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

A book-length study of electronic text and other forms of digital inscription. While the project is critical and theoretical in nature, it differs from previous considerations of the subject in both its level of technological detail (which is considerable) and in its emphasis on material and historical tools for understanding electronic textuality. The book's point of departure is William Gibson's famously self-erasing electronic poem "Agrippa" (1992) and its afterlife on the Internet of today. Mechanisms takes seriously the notion that a proper account of digital inscription is impossible absent recognition of a text’s status as data, object, and code as it is transmitted across multiple platforms, systems, and software environments.

Associated Products

Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Book)
Title: Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
Author: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Abstract: 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."
Year: 2008
Primary URL: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11336
Primary URL Description: MIT Press Website
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/mechanisms-new-media-and-the-forensic-imagination/oclc/79256819&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL Description: Worldcat entry.
Publisher: MIT Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0-262-11311-2

Prizes

MLA Prize for a First Book
Date: 12/1/2008
Organization: Modern Language Association
Abstract: MLA Prize for a First Book

George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize in Book History
Date: 1/1/2009
Organization: Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP)
Abstract: George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize in Book History

Richard J. Finneran Award
Date: 1/1/2009
Organization: Society for Textual Scholarship
Abstract: In the winter of 2005, the STS Executive Board voted to raise money to establish an enduring memorial to Richard J. Finneran in the form of the Finneran Award, a prize given in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the preceding two calendar years.

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