Titular

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).

A Hard Driving Review

Nick Montfort posts a hard driving review of Mechanisms over on Grand Text Auto.

Kirschenbaum’s forensic approach to information storage technologies shows us qualities of the machine that have seldom, if ever, been remarked upon in new media studies.

This is not your father’s book about hard drives. It’s also not the type of book we had in digital media studies five or ten years ago.

Mechanisms is about more than hard drives of course. But my biggest concern was finding a way to discuss new media with the same degree of material specificity we've been accustomed to seeing in other fields, and I'm thrilled that as perceptive and knowledgeable a reader as Nick has found that in the book.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace

This phrase, adapted from pioneering forensic investigator Edmond Locard, is not only one of my chapter titles in Mechanisms, but also one of the central dictums of the book, for I claim this holds true as much (or more) in digital environments as the physical world. So I was intrigued to read an account of software developed to detect digital image tampering in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 6, 2008):

Mr. Farid, of Dartmouth, has developed software tools that can automatically check for image tampering. The software looks for patterns in the digital code underlying an image. When files are opened and altered in Photoshop, for instance, codes are added that Mr. Farid's software can detect. Likewise, when scientists copy and paste parts of images in software programs, their actions leave a digital mark. (A10)

In the book, I described the kind of "marks" Farid's software detects as an artifact of what I termed formal materiality. I wrote:

An image file is typically thought of as consisting of nothing but information about the image itself—the composition of its pixilated bitmap, essentially. In fact, however, the image can carry metadata (documentation as to how it was created, embedded as plain text in the “header” of the file), as well as more colorful freight, such as a steganographic image or a digital watermark. This content will only become visible when the data object is subjected to the appropriate formal processes, which is to say when the appropriate software environment is invoked—anything from the “Show Header” function of an off-the-shelf image viewer to a 128-bit encryption key. (12-13)

The kind of software the described in the Chronicle's article contributes to our understanding of digital objects as mechanisms, that is as artifacts with a recoverable past--as opposed to black boxes or inscrutable blobs of code.

June Open Thread

Comments, questions, rants, raves. You know the drill.

The Royal Treatment

I got my first royalty check today from sales of Mechanisms!

Transformer 2.0

From the Humanities Computing Centre at UVic comes word of a handy quasi-forensic utility for extracting text strings from old binaries. If you have need of such, go check out Transformer 2.0.

WIRED Tours Computer Forensics Lab

WIRED discovers computer forensics, with a short article (and some good photos) here.

I toured a similar lab when researching Mechanisms. At one point, as we were preceding through a large room filled with people working in cubicles, I noticed that a set of blue rotating bubble lights had been lit. I asked what they were for. "They're for you," my escort said; this was the signal that visitor was in the room and that any sensitive material needed to disappear from screens.

Thanks to GHW for the tip.

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 (and May) Open Thread

Comments and questions about the book. No foolin'.