City Lights

Spotted in the wild at City Lights in San Francisco. Keeping some good company too. The all-things-digital section there is named "Topographies," which I rather like.

Spotted in the Wild

Or actually, in its native habitat. Brett Bobley snapped this pic of Mechanisms on the shelf at the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. In good company too. Thanks Brett!

Rutgers

Big thanks to Meredith McGill and everyone at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis for having me up to discuss Mechanisms as part of their New Media Literacies seminar the other day. So, basically, the way this works is you have fifteen or so terrifically bright grad students, post docs, and faculty who have read large chunks of the book spend three hours talking through the work with you, then (after some wine at a reception) whisk you off to a tremendous Greek restaurant where more mine is consumed, along with copious amounts of delicious food. Seriously, one of the nicest visits I've had, and some invaluable feedback. Rereading one's own work sometimes seems like equal parts guilty pleasure and mortification, but too often in this profession we want to hear about what's new, what's next, and what's in progress---as though ideas shed their interest value once published. Not so. Going back to Mechanisms in such good company was a pleasure.

Mechanisms Wordle

Fall Syllabi?

Noticed that Amanda Gailey, who teaches digital humanities at University of Georgia, has included Mechanisms on her fall syllabi (thanks Amanda; if you see this please encourage your students to follow the blog and post questions here).

If you're teaching the book, or know of others who are, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Living With a Computer (in 1982)

Just read through James Fallows "Living With a Computer," a piece he wrote for The Atlantic back in 1982. Fallows, then a recent convert to word processing, enthusiastically sang the praises of his first system, a Processor Technology SOL-20 running a software package called Electric Pencil.

It's a fascinating look into the early home computer industry, and also a bracing reminder of how much certain fundamental affordances of the computing experience have changed over the years. One of the points Mechanisms tried to hit repeatedly is that storage was a far more visible and . . . grungier dimension of that experience than we typically understand today, when storage devices are abstracted into disk partitions (accessed via icons on a desktop) or else accessorized as fashion and lifestyle statements (iPods or thumbdrives). Here are some of the best bits. Keep in mind that Fallows is writing within a year of the ascendancy of MS-DOS.

. . . the war of standardization for personal computers is just about over. The crucial, bitterly contested territory was the disk-operating system, the coded instructions that enable computers to interface (the word cannot be escaped in this business) with the disk drives. My system uses the North Star Disk Operating System, abbreviated DOS and pronounced doss, but North Star didn't win. The winner was a DOS called CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers), which has become the industry standard and is earning millions for a formerly small company known as Digital Research.

The practical limit on what a computer can do is not the memory built into the machine itself [. . .] but rather how much information it can quickly draw from its disks.

The top of the line among storage systems is the hard disk, most often available in the form called the Winchester. (This is not a brand but a nickname, applied by wits in the computer world because the model number on one of the earliest drives was 3030, reminiscent of a rifle.) The other disks, known as floppies, get pulled in and out of their drives like tape cassettes, but a Winchester is permanently sealed in its case. You don't need to remove the hard disks because each one stores a prodigious amount of data, from two or three on up to several dozen megabytes. With even a small Winchester, you can store some 2,000 pages of data at once—enough, for example, to contain all the notes for a book, along with drafts of all chapters, or a record of all your correspondence over a period of years. Winchesters are expensive; cheap models go for about $2,000, and some of them cost at least twice that much. But you shouldn't buy one right now anyway They're just entering the period of soaring volume and falling prices and will be cheaper in a year.

So, living with a computer circa 1982: hard drives are still as yet exotic indulgences (storing up to 2000 pages!), disk operating systems have been the subject of bitter industry infighting, and the experience of computing itself is characterized in part by the repeated activity of swapping diskettes in and out of drives. (I remember what a big deal it was when my family added a second 5 1/4" drive to our Apple IIe, allowing me to run games and other programs which depended on being able to draw data from two disks at the same time.) There's still much work to be done on storage, inscription, and the machinery of computation.

Amazon

More than six months out of the gate, and Mechanisms has yet to garner a single review/rating on Amazon. This is not surprising, few university press titles ever do (Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media is something of an exception, with fourteen ratings; by contrast, Espen Aarseth's Cybertext, published in 1997 and indisputably a foundational text in the field, has a mere three ratings).

Question: are Amazon ratings important for an academic book? Or will the long tail take care of its own?

Preservation as Software Studies

My "pecha kucha" presentation at Softwhere 2008.

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).

The Royal Treatment

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

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.

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.)

Spotted in the Wild?

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

Mechanisms Podcast

Mechanisms is featured in the MIT Press’s January podcast. I discuss various aspects of the book, including the significance of storage in new media studies, my archival work on Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, and the ethics of forensic studies. It’s about 15 minutes. (Direct link to the Mp3.)

Published!

Mechanisms' publication date is January 2008, but the books arrived at MIT Press's warehouse on December 12, 2007, and a couple of days later I had my copies at my door. It was available at Amazon.com and other online vendors soon afterward, and also at the MIT Press booth at the Chicago MLA.