Mechanisms by Matthew G Kirschenbaum

Mechanisms by Matthew G Kirschenbaum

A new textual studies and archival approach to the investigation of works of new media and electronic literature that applies techniques of computer forensics to conduct media-specific readings of William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa, Michael Joyce's Afternoon, and the interactive game Mystery House.In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage--the hard drive in particular--arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between forensic materiality and formal materiality, Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Center for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262517409
ISBN 10	026251740X
Title	Mechanisms
Author	Matthew G Kirschenbaum
Series	Mechanisms
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2012-01-06
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.