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.

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.

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.

Storage Studies

So one of the things Mechanisms tries to do is make the case for storage, the ugly duckling in the new media ecology. (Storage is boring. What can one possibly say about it?) In the book, I spend one chapter on developing a "grammatology" of hard drives, and another conducting a protracted forensic walkthrough of a disk image of the old Apple II game Mystery House. (And here I just cannot believe this thing isn't shooting to the top of the bestseller lists, folks.) Anyway, courtesy of Jeremy Douglass, comes this remarkable entry on Oldskooler Ramblings, entitled "The diskette that blew Trixter's mind."

We join the story as our hero, Trixter, is rummaging through some recent antiquarian acquisitions for games to archive in his collection and comes across something strange:

. . . and it was when I got to Mental Blocks that I ran into something I’d never seen before: The manual for Mental Blocks claims that, for both C64 and IBM, you put the diskette in label-side up. I thought that had to be a typo, since every single mixed C64/IBM or Apple/IBM diskette I have ever seen is a “flippy” disk where one side is IBM and the other side is C64 or Apple — until I looked at the FAT12 for the disk and saw that tons of sectors in an interleaved pattern were marked as BAD — very strange usage.

Basically, each sector on the diskette is formatted for either the C64 or IBM, in an interleaved pattern; in other words, it's "a mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette." (The screenshot of the diskette's FAT on the Oldskool blog is pretty jaw-dropping.) Trixter goes on to muse:

I think I need to go on a mission to discover who built the disk format(s) by hand to see what he was thinking. Did he work on it for weeks, feverishly trying to figure out how to meet the publisher’s demands? Or was he so brilliant that he did it all in a day or so, not thinking too much about it other than it was just another facet of his job? Fascinating stuff!

Indeed. The desire to get inside this guy's head (assuming it was a guy) speaks volumes about the allure of what I've once or twice called, new media tongue-firmly-in-cheek, "storage studies." What really interests me is that it's marker of how much the material affordances of computing have changed in the last two decades, since this kind of physical consideration of the geometry of the diskette and its low-level formatting would be unthinkable in an era of terabyte drives. There's also something wonderfully analogous to the codex, "an acknowledgment of the extent to which efficient inscription demands the rationalization of the writing space, regardless of medium" (80-1) as I put it in the hard drive chapter.

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.

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.

July/August Open Thread

Questions, comments, have at.

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?