Data from Columbia's Hard Drive

Significant scientific research data has been successfully read from a hard drive recovered from the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Needless to say the drive itself had undergone severe trauma.

The seeming-paradox of digital data's extreme vulnerability and remarkable persistence is one of my foundational concerns in Mechanisms. The book opens with a similar tale of data recovery from hard drives that were salvaged from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Mechanisms argues that the volatility of digital data is a function not of its inscriptive regimen (which is among the most durable and forensically replete we have ever created) but rather the increasing orders of abstraction that attend digital data in order to manipulate it in usable form--thus the book's central distinction between what I term forensic and formal materiality.

Thanks to Nathan Kalber for the tip.

Update: This CNN coverage adds some interesting details, including the fact that the drive's computer was running DOS, meaning that the data was written in one discreet area of the drive rather than scattered over multiple discontinuous sectors--which created the conditions necessary for localized physical trauma to miss the areas with stored information.

Mechanisms Meets the Students

Came across a sequence of blogs posts on the book from undergraduate students in one of Dennis Jerz's classes at Seton Hill. It looks to me like they were remarkably patient and persistent with it, early comments ranging from "frankly I am not enjoying this book at all so far" and "my head hurts" to later chapters, where "chapter 3 is making things much more interesting" and "I really enjoyed the section of the chapter dealing with formal materiality and applications" and "Kirschenbaum keeps emphasizing that a computer’s environment is built . . . I feel like he is almost saying that the computer was made for simulations and the reproduction of reality." If any of Dennis's students want to post specific questions here I'm happy to try to answer.

April Open Thread

Comments and questions about the book. No foolin'.

Errata (2)

p. 103. The correct title of the work I am discussing is Data Diaries, not Digital Diaries (two references).

Practical Persistence/Practical Ephemerality

Cathy Davidson introduces these potentially useful terms in the course of an exchange over citation conventions for Twitter, during which Mechanisms came up in the comments:

http://www.hastac.org/node/1266

February (and March) Open Thread

February open thread for comments and questions about the book.

Top Ten

Wow! As can be seen on MIT Press's current home page, Mechanisms was one of their top ten sellers for the month of January. (I'm not sure if the list is in order or not, but Mechanisms is the seventh book on it.)

Notice from Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs Mechanisms, generously stating "There is nothing as good as this book on the material nature of digital encoding or inscription, from the point of view of the history of verbal language recording systems and writing, indeed, of textual transmission or, in Randall McLeod’s term [. . .] transformission."

January Open Thread

January open thread for comments and questions about the book.

Spotted in the Wild?

Have you seen Mechanisms in a brick-and-mortar bookstore? Let me know!