Flash Drives From Flight 1549

Flash drives salvaged from baggage left behind from US Air flight 1549's emergency landing in the Hudson have been returned to passengers in good working order.

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?

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.

The Great Wiping Controversy

No, it's not about what you're thinking. In a new paper, Craig Wright, Dave Kleinman, and Shyaam Sundhar R. S. seek to debunk the notion that it takes more than a single overwrite to securely delete digital data. "We demonstrate that the controversy surrounding this topic is unfounded."

The paper represents a challenge to some of the arguments in Mechanisms regarding the permanence of digital inscription. In particular, the authors suggest that Peter Gutmann's method of multiple redundant data passes to "sanitize" magnetic media has had undue influence, introducing a mythology about the difficulty of effectively erasing information stored on a magnetic disk.

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.

HotU RIP

Home of the Underdogs, the venerable abandonware site I write about at the end of chapter 4 (by way of contrast to archival spaces such as the Harry Ransom Center) is gone. The news comes from Alan Au on the IGDA Game Preservation SIG:

. . . the long-standing abandonware site "Home of the Underdogs" finally succumbed to hosting troubles on Monday (the webhosting company went bankrupt) and is probably gone for good.

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!

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.

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.