Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination: February 2009

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Review in Technical Communication

Got tipped off to a very nice review in the February 2009 issue of the journal Technical Communication. The author, Michael Truscello, describes the book's turn toward computer forensics as "ingenious," and adds: "Kirschenbaum's contribution to new media studies is substantial and not only transforms the way literature and technical writing can be theorized but also speaks to the ways history is preserved in and retrieved from digital archives or how culture in general forms at 'the nexus of storage, inscription, and instrumentation'."

Thanks to Truscello for a careful and generous reading.

Friday, February 13, 2009

HotU RIP

Home of the Underdogs, the venerable abandonware site I write about at the end of chapter 4 (by way of contrast to archival spaces such as the Harry Ransom Center) is gone. The news comes from Alan Au on the IGDA Game Preservation SIG:

. . . the long-standing abandonware site "Home of the Underdogs" finally succumbed to hosting troubles on Monday (the webhosting company went bankrupt) and is probably gone for good.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Not Such a Clear CHOICE

A positive, but awkward and opaque review in the January 2009 issue of CHOICE: "Mechanisms is a work devoted to existentialism in the media of computer hardware and software in the digital age. . . . Recommended."

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"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