Mechanisms: The Floppy Edition

The paperback printing of Mechanisms (ISBN 026251740X)has been out for a couple of months now and appears to be doing nicely. A couple of minor erratum were corrected and the cover design is slightly reworked, but otherwise it is the same as the cloth edition. Thank you MIT Press!

Kindle Edition

Mechanisms is now out in a Kindle edition.

CLIR Digital Forensics Report Out

I'm very happy to announce the availability of Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a new CLIR report emerging from the Mellon-sponsored workshop on the same topic held last spring here at the University of Maryland. The report (written by myself, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriela Redwine, with research assistance from Rachel Donahue) introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence.

Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections is available electronically at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub149abst.html. Print copies will be available in January for ordering through CLIR's Web site, for $25 per copy plus shipping and handling.

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.

Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections

Funding for a new project which I'm very excited about as it gives me a chance to apply some of the ideas in Mechanisms in real-world contexts. Here's the official announcement:

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the receipt of an $81,000 award from the Scholarly Communications program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award will support research for and the writing of a report entitled Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, to be published in fall 2010 by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); the award will also fund a symposium on the same topic at the University of Maryland in May 2010, at which experts from the cultural heritage sector and computer and information science, as well as practitioners in government, industry, and defense will convene to comment on the report and explore shared interests and practices.

Maryland's work on the report and symposium will be lead by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum (Associate Director of MITH and Associate Professor of English); he will be joined by co-authors Richard Ovenden (Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford) and Gabriela Redwine, an archivist and electronic records specialist at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

MITH's director Neil Fraistat comments, "Matt Kirschenbaum's leadership in bibliography, digital forensics, and digital preservation has helped position MITH at the forefront of crucial new work that is reconfiguring archival studies and practices. One of two recent grants from the Mellon Foundation on which MITH will be working in the coming year, Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections allows us to continue fruitful partnerships with the Bodleian Library and the Ransom Center and promises to be a major leap forward for the field."

DeLong Book History Prize

I'm thrilled and humbled to announce that Mechanisms has won the DeLong Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). The prize is conferred annually for the "best book on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, or uses of script or print published in the previous year." It was announced last week in Toronto at the organizaton's annual conference.

When I wrote Mechanisms I knew, by virtue of the imprimatur of the MIT Press, that the book would find its audiences in new media studies. Equally important to me but much less certain was whether it would attract readers in fields like textual scholarship and the history of the book, which I considered the main precedents for my particular approach to the born-digital. The fact that Mechanisms has succeeded so well in doing this is immensely gratifying (as also evidenced by its winning the Finneran Prize), and I'm equally delighted that SHARP's sense of "book history" so obviously includes artifacts like hard drives and diskettes.

I have many friends in the SHARP community, though somehow I have never made it to their annual conference. Next year it is in Helsinki which might be a stretch but I will certainly be putting in a proposal for the 2011 conference in DC. Thank you again to SHARP!

Richard J. Finneran Award

I am humbled, delighted, and frankly floored to announce that Mechanisms has won the Richard J. Finneran award from the Society for Textual Scholarship for best monograph or edition published in 2007-8. The award was conferred at the conference banquet in NYC the other night.

Richard J. Finneran was Professor of English at the University of Tennessee before an untimely death in 2005. In addition to serving as Executive Director of the STS, he was a distinguished scholar and editor of Yeats, his edition of the poems literally laying the foundation for the study of the poet's major works. He was also one of the first to grasp the implications of computers and new media for literary and textual studies. When I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, one of the first books I bought after deciding to do serious work in electronic textuality was The Literary Text in the Digital Age, which he edited. I had no idea who Richard Finneran was at the time, but I did know he had succeeded in gathering between two covers pretty much everyone in that field who was important to me. Several years later I met Richard in person at an MLA, at a session sponsored by the STS. I still didn’t know what he looked like, but he, somehow, knew who I was and in a room full of his distinguished colleagues and friends he took the time to greet and engage an assistant professor who hadn’t read Yeats since his comps.

This year, the STS conferred two Finneran awards, one for Mechanisms and the second for Richard's own facsimile edition of Yeats's The Tower, published posthumously by Cornell University Press in 2007. It is a tremendous honor and I am very grateful.