American Antiquarian Society
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What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts—and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading—are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the "text" of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun?
These are the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Bitstreams, a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. With an intimate narrative style that belies the cold technics of computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the library where all access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is mediated by digital technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's Macintosh; to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost "HyperPoems" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio reimagining the future of the codex.Literary Heritage (2021).
Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, where he co-founded and co-directs BookLab, a makerspace for printing and the book arts. He is the author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016), and, most recently, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage (2021).