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.

Want

This amazing hard disk coffee table, fashioned from a 26-inch CDC platter.

Infodecodata

More hard drive-based art: Infodecodata has issued an open call for participants to generate treemap images of their hard drives using their Sequoia visualization software and upload them to an online exhibition gallery.

There is a clear lineage here that includes Carlo Zanni's You Are Your C (see below), Mary Flanagan's Phage and Cory Arcangel's Data Diaries, all discussed in Mechanisms.

Endless Nameless

Somewhere in Mechanisms I suggest that the hard drive has been under-utilized as a platform (in its own right) for digital art. I mention a couple of pieces like "Your Are Your C" by Carlo Zanni, and speculate that we will see more.

From Danny Snelson comes word of "Endless Nameless," a collaborative project that involves stocking used hard drives with data assemblages and selling them, iTunes-like, for .99/GB:

Endless Nameless presents a double articulation of popular data trafficking along with the material histories of our digitally dislocated artifacts. Cataloging this 'nude media' by original source, the book loops these distribution circuits in a nostalgic allegory of publication: celebrating the publishers while disseminating huge amounts of unsanctioned information.

I like it. I just can't afford it.

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."

Heavy Data

Hands down the best thing on the materiality of digital infrastructure I've read since Neil Stephenson's magisterial "Mother Earth Mother Board": Tom Vanderbilt's "Data Overload" looks at the architecture of data centers (and the geography of "the cloud") for the New York Times Magazine.

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite. The photos in a box are replaced by JPEGs on a hard drive, then a hosted sharing service like Snapfish. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

In the spirit of Mechanisms' "following the bits all the way to the metal," Vanderbilt goes and finds out.

Bruce Sterling on Bits

I wish I could say Sterling had been reading his Kirschenbaum, but he wrote this years before Mechanisms was out. It's great:

This is the part where we really have to scrunch up and stare, ladies and gentlemen. Because every time that the computer industry confuses its hardware with philosophy, we’ve got a serious problem. A stream of bits is not just ones and zeroes. Ones and zeroes are numbers, and even if arithmetic is immaterial, computers aren’t. Bits are not different from atoms: bits are bits of atoms. Bits are not ghosts or spirits or good intentions, bits have to be measurable, observable physical objects, like a Greek vase. Bits may be too small for the naked eye to see, but just like a cold germ or a hepatitis virus, they are most definitely around, and they’re a lot of trouble. Bits are moving electrons, moving photons, or they are magnetized clumps of atoms, laser burn marks in plastic, iron filings stuck together with tape. That’s what bits are.

The piece is called "Digital Decay." It's available as part of a superb collection by the Variable Media Network called Permanence Through Change.

No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for AGRIPPA

A MAJOR post-script to Mechanisms . . .



Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. On December 9, 2008--the sixteenth anniversary of the original "Transmission" event debuting Agrippa--The Agrippa Files (http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu) announces the release of two major new discoveries for scholars and fans:

* An emulated "run" of the entire original Agrippa poem, made possible by the forensic recovery of the code containing Gibson's text from a mint condition Agrippa diskette loaned by collector Allan Chasanoff. This is the first public view of Agrippa in its original incarnation (that is, its custom-made behaviors and interface) since 1992. (direct link)

* An hour's worth of never-before-seen footage from the December 9, 1992, public debut of Agrippa at the Americas Society in New York City during the "Transmission" event. This footage, shot by "Templar, Rosehammer, and Pseudophred" is the source of the transcription of the text that was released online within hours of the event.
(direct link)

These materials are accompanied by high-resolution images, stills from the video, screenshots, and a bit-level copy of the disk image itself, all publicly accessible with the permission of Kevin Begos, Jr., William Gibson, Allan Chasanoff, "Templar," and "Rosehammer."

We are also pleased to be releasing a major new full-length essay documenting the process of recovering these materials and exploring their significance for the study of the work: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, "No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa." (direct link)

The Agrippa Files, a project of the UC Santa Barbara English Department's
Literature.Culture.Media Center, was aided by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and the Digital Forensics Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, in recovering and releasing these materials. Special thanks to Doug Reside and Matt Kirschenbaum for their efforts.

Alan Liu
Professor and Chair
Department of English,
UC Santa Barbara

Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Professor and Associate Director,
Department of English and MITH
University of Maryland

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.

Practical Persistence/Practical Ephemerality

Cathy Davidson introduces these potentially useful terms in the course of an exchange over citation conventions for Twitter, during which Mechanisms came up in the comments:

http://www.hastac.org/node/1266