Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination: December 2009

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Mechanisms Wins MLA First Book Prize

I am simply floored to be announcing that Mechanisms has won the MLA's sixteenth annual Prize for a First Book. The press release and citation is here. The award will be conferred at the convention in Philadelphia at the end of the month.

Two Reviews and a Response at RCCS

The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies has published two new, very enthusiastic, reviews of Mechanisms: the first is by Viola Lasmana and the second is by Jentery Sayers. In addition, since it has been out for two years this December, I took the opportunity to write a response and offer some reflections on the book's reception and implications.

I feel especially fortunate to have Mechanisms joining the last set of reviews to be published at RCCS, which was founded over a decade ago by David Silver when he was still a graduate student in American Studies here at the University of Maryland. David is now retiring the site to move on to other projects, but RCCS was one of the places where I had long been looking forward to earning a review, and while it's a relief to have them come back so positive it's also a sadness to see the site come to the end of its work.

"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

Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Mechanisms Wins MLA First Book Prize

Two Reviews and a Response at RCCS

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