I knew from the moment that I began working on the project that I wanted the book to be called Mechanisms. I was terrified, though, that someone else in the field would use the title first. It seemed like such an obvious choice--"mechanism" is a word that crops up in our conversations all the time. For me it was perfect, capturing the mechanistic side of computation that I was keen to foreground, as well as connoting both product and process, artifact and algorithm.
The subtitle was much more difficult to nail. Initially it was something like "New Media and the Forensics of Digital Inscription." Ugh. One of the original reviewers for the project gently suggested I might like to reconsider. I did like the focus on inscription (as opposed to text or textuality), but let's face it, that's not a construction calculated to grab even the scholarly impulse buyer. I subsequently played with many variations, trying to retain forensics, textuality or inscription, and new media as key concepts. For a long while, the book was subtitled "New Media and Forensic Textuality," and it appears as such in some early citations. Textuality was important to me because the book is so deeply grounded in humanistic traditions of textual scholarship, but in the end I just couldn't make it work. "New Media and Forensic Textuality" was a phrase which smothered; "New Media and the Forensic Imagination" struck me as dynamic and evocative. The book's coda is also called "The Forensic Imagination," so there's some nice structural reinforcement there. In the end I'm quite pleased with how I titled the book, and I should also mention that the MIT Press gave me complete freedom to do so, for which I am very grateful (I know many colleagues publishing elsewhere who have had glib or awkward titles foisted on them by marketing departments).
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Winner of the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship, the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, and the 16th annual MLA Prize for a First Book.
A blog in support of the book from the MIT Press by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.
Winner of the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship, the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, and the 16th annual MLA Prize for a First Book.
"Mechanisms is at the cutting edge of second generation scholarship on digital media and electronic literature. After the first generation's inflated claims and broad generalities, Mechanisms leads the way with precise, rigorous analysis both of the nature of digital media and of important works created in networked and programmable platforms. An essential work for anyone interested in the electronic literature, digital arts, and culture in the digital age."
--N. Katherine Hayles, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles
"Very few scholars have a precise understanding of the symmetries and asymmetries that define the relation of paper-based and digital technologies. Now when we need that kind of understanding, we are weathering a perfect storm raised by the long neglect of philological discipline, on one hand, and avoidance of any practical understanding of computerized resources on the other. Kirschenbaum's lucid book engages trenchantly with these important and pressing matters. It will wake its neighbors up."
--Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
"At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription. This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media."
--Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film & Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries
"Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of textual artifacts in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered. The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovich's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields."
--Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
--N. Katherine Hayles, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles
"Very few scholars have a precise understanding of the symmetries and asymmetries that define the relation of paper-based and digital technologies. Now when we need that kind of understanding, we are weathering a perfect storm raised by the long neglect of philological discipline, on one hand, and avoidance of any practical understanding of computerized resources on the other. Kirschenbaum's lucid book engages trenchantly with these important and pressing matters. It will wake its neighbors up."
--Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
"At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription. This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media."
--Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film & Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries
"Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of textual artifacts in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered. The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovich's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields."
--Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
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