Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Errata (2)

p. 103. The correct title of the work I am discussing is Data Diaries, not Digital Diaries (two references).

Friday, March 21, 2008

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

Thursday, February 7, 2008

February (and March) Open Thread

February open thread for comments and questions about the book.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

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.)

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."

Monday, January 14, 2008

January Open Thread

January open thread for comments and questions about the book.

Spotted in the Wild?

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

Errata

As the need arises (hopefully not too often) I will use this blog to note any significant errata. Here is the first such instance:

p. 263. "The video went up onto MindVox that same night"

Not the "video," but the transcribed text of Gibson's "Agrippa." The video itself was never posted (nor could it have been, given the BBS technology).

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.

"Mechanisms is at the cutting edge of second generation scholarship on digital media and electronic literature. After the first generation's inflated claims and broad generalities, Mechanisms leads the way with precise, rigorous analysis both of the nature of digital media and of important works created in networked and programmable platforms. An essential work for anyone interested in the electronic literature, digital arts, and culture in the digital age."
--N. Katherine Hayles, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles

"Very few scholars have a precise understanding of the symmetries and asymmetries that define the relation of paper-based and digital technologies. Now when we need that kind of understanding, we are weathering a perfect storm raised by the long neglect of philological discipline, on one hand, and avoidance of any practical understanding of computerized resources on the other. Kirschenbaum's lucid book engages trenchantly with these important and pressing matters. It will wake its neighbors up."
--Jerome McGann, University of Virginia

"At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription. This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media."
--Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film & Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries

"Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of textual artifacts in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered. The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovich's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields."
--Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara