2nd DHQ Review

Mechanisms is extremely fortunate to be the recipient of a 2nd review in Digital Humanities Quarterly. After Johanna Drucker called the book "an exemplary demonstration of scholarly method for the emerging field of digital media studies" in issue 3.2, Manuel Portela now reviews Mechanisms alongside of Kate Hayles's Electronic Literature in a review essay entitled "The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine."

Portela is interested throughout in the overlapping network topologies of digital technologies and online reading environments on the one hand, and the material histories of writing, computing, and inscription that attend textual production across various media. Here is how he concludes:

Hayles’s and Kirschenbaum’s new books offer critically rigorous, intellectually provocative, and highly productive perspectives on new media literary objects. Their technical, sociotextual, and interpretive analyses raise our critical awareness of the specifics of digital materiality and electronic literature to a new theoretical and analytical level. Hayles’s readings of electronic works are exemplary in the way they relate electronic performability to interpretability. Using tropes such as "recursive dynamics," "intelligent machines" and "emergent cognition," she has tried to capture the embodied nature of technology and the distributed nature of subjectivity in human-computer interactions. Kirshenbaum’s approach, in turn, opens up electronic objects to textual criticism, extending the genetic and social text approach of the last two decades to digitally born artifacts. He offers a critically nuanced and technically rigorous description of the multiple layers of formal and forensic materiality, and stresses their interdependence. Taken together, the "electronic" in Electronic Literature and the "mechanism" in Mechanisms clearly resonate in the way they both attempt to link the deep level of machine code to the formal level of textual and metatextual code to the social level of cultural code. The machine in the text and the text in the machine — quintessential expressions of our present postmodern technotextual condition — are now more fully conceptualized in their technical, aesthetic, and social materialities.

Hyperrhiz Review

Dene Grigar has a generous and very well done review of Mechanisms out in Hyperrhiz, as part of a special issue on New Media Subversions:

Stepping back, we can see that Mechanisms is an important book, but not only for the obvious reasons. Yes, it offers the conclusive evidence, the smoking gun (guns since there are three of them), that we have need for talking about the materiality of digital texts. Yes, the book contributes to the growing body of scholarship on platform studies and introduces the study of forensics to digital media. But most importantly, it offers the philosophical and methodological framework needed to grow the field, for it helps to move the humanities toward a renaissance of close reading and textual study, revitalizing it and providing it a strong central practice. Mechanisms is a must read for all of us working in digital media who wonder where it is headed and where it needs to go.

netpoetic

Eliza Deac offers a concise but very well articulated review of Mechanisms on the group netpoetic blog.

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.

Beach Reading

Peter Lunenfeld is including Mechanisms in his summer 2009 beach bag as a "key monograph" for the digital humanities, as reported on Roy Christoper's Summer Reading List. Thanks Peter!

Two New Reviews: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and Drucker in DHQ

Two more reviews for Mechanisms have come in, and I couldn't be more pleased with both.

First, in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34.1 (March 2009), Bert Van Raemdonck presents a very concise and accurate overview of the book, noting:

Kirschenbaum brings to bear on digital media a combination of interdisciplinary and methodological approaches that few scholars, if any, have combined up to now. . . . Kirschenbaum succeeds in turning highly theoretical and technical passages into a cohesive and inspiring story, rather than a mere enumeration of dry facts. (125-6; emphasis in original)

Second, Johanna Drucker (inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA) has reviewed Mechanisms for Digital Humanities Quarterly. Drucker's review is especially important to me, not only because she has long been someone I looked to as a mentor but also because she is one of the key contributors to the theoretical conversation on materiality that drives so much of what's in the book. She writes:

[Kirschenbaum] combines his training in literary and bibliographical studies, engagements with critical and cultural readings in media, and a wonderfully self-confessed geek-enthusiasm for figuring out exactly how things work. The result is improbably readable in its details and compellingly suggestive and significant in its overall argument. The book is also an exemplary demonstration of scholarly method for the emerging field of digital media studies. I’d make it required reading for any class in this field because of its interdisciplinary approach and rich documentation of sources.

She also picks up on the narrative element in the book, as did Van Raedmonck. At times during the writing I wasn't sure how closely I should flirt with obvious thematic corollary to the detective story; so I'm happy if I've managed to strike the right balance. Indeed, Drucker notes: "In fact, one of the great things about Kirschenbaum’s book is that he manages to turn his own fascination with the process of discovery into tales of mysteries that get solved."

Drucker concludes with a provocation that is worth broader discussion. Regarding the book's three main case studies, she writes:

But do any of these works have literary qualities that merit our critical engagement? If these weren’t digital texts would we read them as literature? For all my respect for these folks, I doubt it. Have any works appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value?

To some extent this is a conversation that has already been pursued, for example in an extended exchange on the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog, as well as in the online response to this article in the Guardian. In my own case, I would want stick up for both Joyce and Gibson--I find both afternoon and "Agrippa" to be genuinely affecting works. I also find Kate Hayles's distinction between "literature" and "the literary" useful in this regard. Do readers have additional thoughts?

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.

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."

"Hey wow, another humanities professor who gets it about computers."

Speaking of Bruce Sterling, Mechanisms gets a nice shout out from him in his WIRED blog!

neural Review

A cool new review in neural magazine:

Combining insights from textual analysis and software studies, a number of assumptions about the ephemeral nature of digital systems are thoroughly undone and reconceived . . . useful conceptual distinctions are offered, with far-reaching consequences for debates in the field of new media more generally, including a detailed explanation of how von Neumann architectures offer a working model of immateriality via the implementation of a vast material cascade of affordances.

Plus, Michael Dieter did a longish interview with me exclusive to the newsstand edition.

Tabbi at ebr

A copy of the review by Joseph Tabbi that appeared in the Summer 2008 issue (Vol. 49, no. 2) of Contemporary Literature (see below) is now online at ebr.

Tabbi in Contemporary Literature

Joseph Tabbi, Professor of English at UIC, founder of ebr, and current president of the Electronic Literature Organization offers some very probing and thoughtful comments about Mechanisms in "Locating the Literary in New Media" (MUSE subscription required), a review essay published in Contemporary Literature 49.2 (Summer 2008): 311-331.

To separate an operative signal from noise is not only the goal of information science but also, Kirschenbaum reminds us, the foundation of modern bibliographic studies in its concern with the transmission of literary texts. Kirschenbaum cites essentially all modern textual scholars on this point, from his University of Virginia mentor, Jerome McGann, back through Randall McLeod, Fredson Bowers, and W. W. Greg, who in 1932 stated, "at the root of all literary criticism lies the question of transmission, and it is bibliography that enables us to deal with the problem" (qtd. in Kirschenbaum 214). Kirschenbaum argues--implicitly, through case studies, rather than polemically--that such an informatic, forensic approach is as relevant today as ever, and even more so as the devices for storage and routes of literary transmission are multiplied by computers and carried by expanding networks of communication.

The essay also takes up recent books by Thomas Foster, Kate Hayles, and Martin Kevorkian. Well worth a look all around.

Software Studies

Mechanisms earns a mention in Michael Deiter's review of the new Software Studies collection edited by Matthew Fuller, currently at the top of my own to-get list:

Here, engineering documents were as likely a source of inspiration as Gilles Deleuze or Marshall McLuhan, resulting in a ‘material turn’ constituted by highly engaging work such as Alex Galloway’s protocological network theory or the more recent forensic hard drive analysis of Matthew Kirschenbaum. Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, should be considered as explicitly positioned in relation to this transition and its concerns.

I very much conceived of Mechanisms as a contribution to software studies, so it's nice to be in such good company.

Leonardo Review

Jan Baetens (poet and Professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies of the University of Leuven) reviews Mechanisms for Leonardo On-Line, calling the book "a watershed":

In the reflection on new media, this book is undoubtedly a watershed publication. Its basic stance is that electronic writing can only be understood if we accept to consider it a real form of writing, i.e. of material inscriptions on material surfaces, and therefore to leave behind many of the myths that surround digital culture.

What makes Kirschenbaum’s work so thrilling and innovative is, however, not only the demonstration that electronic writing is also a way of writing, even if the computer is a machine meant to withdraw its own material operations from our attention [. . .] At least as important is the humanist viewpoint defended by the author [. . .] In his book, Kirschenbaum uses forensics as a tool to think of electronic writing as a chain of contacts which are never materially lost, while at the same time insisting on the fact that it is much more than just a sequencing of inscriptions on a hard disk (of on other types of surfaces, although the hard disk has now become the dominating form).

Mechanisms, which opens totally new grounds for electronic textual scholarship, will be one of the books that can redefine what it means to be a digerate.

Wow. It's an amazingly generous review, but also very detailed. I'm floored.

A Hard Driving Review

Nick Montfort posts a hard driving review of Mechanisms over on Grand Text Auto.

Kirschenbaum’s forensic approach to information storage technologies shows us qualities of the machine that have seldom, if ever, been remarked upon in new media studies.

This is not your father’s book about hard drives. It’s also not the type of book we had in digital media studies five or ten years ago.

Mechanisms is about more than hard drives of course. But my biggest concern was finding a way to discuss new media with the same degree of material specificity we've been accustomed to seeing in other fields, and I'm thrilled that as perceptive and knowledgeable a reader as Nick has found that in the book.

Notice from Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs Mechanisms, generously stating "There is nothing as good as this book on the material nature of digital encoding or inscription, from the point of view of the history of verbal language recording systems and writing, indeed, of textual transmission or, in Randall McLeod’s term [. . .] transformission."