Bitstreams : The Future of Digital Literary Heritage

Matthew G Kirschenbaum

ISBN 10: 0812253418 / ISBN 13: 9780812253412

Published by University Of Pennsylvania Press Nov 2021, 2021

About this Item

Neuware - 'An exploration of bibliography in the digital age and the threshold between the formally idealized state machine of the digital computer and the messy, human, and asymmetrical lifeworld of people. The future of digital literary heritage will be as hit and miss, as luck dependent, as fragile, contingent, and (yet) wondrously replete as that of books and manuscripts. It will be in libraries and archives, but also data centers and server farms. It will be in human as well as machine memory. The future of digital literary heritage will be what we make it out to be'--.

Seller Inventory # 9780812253412

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bitstreams : The Future of Digital Literary Heritage
• Publisher: University Of Pennsylvania Press Nov 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812253418
• ISBN 13: 9780812253412
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 233W x 157H x 16D millimeters 233 millimeters width by 157 millimeters height by 16 millimeters depth
• Weight: 372 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.
A persistent theme is that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing—are never self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.

About the Author

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination and Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. He is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.