Electronic Textual Editing

Palms reminds me: the contents of the TEI-MLA Guide to Electronic Textual Editing are now available online in their entirety. A generous bounty—major essays and authors here.

Nature

Word of the Day

en·gram (ĕn’grăm’)
n.

A physical alteration thought to occur in living neural tissue in response to stimuli, posited as an explanation for memory.

[German Engramm : EN- + Greek -gramma, -gram.]

"Every Contact Leaves a Trace"

I’m speaking at the History of Material Texts seminar at the University of Pennsylvania next week (Monday, April 4, at 5:15 in the Penn Humanities Forum). Here’s the abstract for my talk, based on material from my book:

Every Contact Leaves a Trace: Computers Forensics and Electronic Textuality

“Every contact leaves a trace” was the dictum propagated by Edmond Locard, police inspector of Lyons and pioneer of modern forensic science. This talk will explore what the emerging field of computer forensics—most recently in the news with the capture of the confessed “BTK killer” using evidence obtained from a floppy disk—has to tell us about electronic textuality, particularly the now well-turned question of the materiality of electronic documents.

Legally a computer file is a form of physical evidence. I will suggest that the nature of forensic evidence and the field’s applied techniques ask us to reconsider many chestnuts about electronic writing—its presumed ephemerality, for example, or the postmodern concept of the simulacrum—copies without originals. The talk will illustrate the concept of “forensic readings” of electronic literature, while also drawing parallels to more traditional forms of bibliography and textual criticism—considering what these venerable fields, the most sophisticated branches of media studies I know, have to offer the digital word.

Data Recoveries of the Rich and Famous

DriverSavers, a data recovery service, offers testimonials from the likes of Sting, Sean Connery, Sarah Jessica Parker, Industrial Light and Magic, Keith Richards, and Isaac Hayes—all of whom sent them their thrashed hard drives and got their data back. John Christopher of the company says:

A few years ago, I had done a data recovery on a drive and was calling the customer to confirm that I had gotten back all the information he needed from the drive. He asked me to go through and check these folders and I noticed a lot of Simpson’s stuff on his drive like icons and games. He asked me to check the folder called “Scripts.” We launched one of the documents and I said, “Wow, these are great. Where did you get them?” and he said that he wrote them. It turned out that he was one of the writers and producers for the show “The Simpsons.” He then told me that, amazingly, this was the only copy of twelve scripts that they had not yet produced, including their season finale of that year which was “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” so thank goodness we could get all his data back. They were most grateful and they even sent us an autographed picture signed by Homer.

Even better stories are to be had in The Museum of Disk-Asters. Like the laptop that sat at the bottom of the Amazon River for two days.

This is why electronic writing fascinates me: as fragile and ephemeral as it is under some circumstances, under others it’s the stickiest and most persistent medium we’ve ever devised. That conundrum is at the heart of my book.

Chance and Games

A very thoughtful essay about the role of chance in game design, by Bowen Simmons.

Around 1995

Via Jill: Selected Internet Resources for Writers, a pamphlet that was the first publication of the organizaton that would become trAce, documents the state of the digital literary c. 1995. Now itself reproduced and documented online.

Trackbacks Closed

I regret that I have had to close trackbacks on entries older than 21 days due to massive numbers of spammed pings.

Analog and Digital at CLC

West Virginia’s Center for Literary Computing has opened up a Zope wiki for discussion of various matters analog and digital. I’ve contributed a comment to the codework section.

Feline Recursion

The Infinite Cat Project. Perhaps everybody already knows about this but me.

No Schroedinger jokes, please.

Cathode Graffiti

Any kid who grew up with an Apple computer in the eighties knows what this is. TextFiles, for which I’ve previously expressed much admiration, offers this amazing and invaluable collection of crack screens (patience, it may take a little while to load).

Redmond A. Simonsen (1942-2005)

Redmond A. Simonsen died last week. You probably don’t know who he was—I did, but only just barely. So go over to Greg Costikyan’s blog to find out from someone who was there:

[B]efore computers were anything that existed outside academia and government, Redmond taught me about UI. He taught me about the importance of graphical representation of information, how showing could be vastly more important than explaining, how a clever visual system could transform a game from mediocrity to fascination. Before digital games existed, he taught me the importance of math in games, the use of algorithmic systems to create gameplay.

Thanks, Redmond, for making the trees green (by way of four-color printing).

Update: NY Times Obituary.

NPR Frustration

Twice now in recent weeks, listening to Weekend Edition Saturday, I’ve heard great music showcased on NPR. One band was some retro-funk/techno combo, and the other garage punk. Trouble is I missed the names of the groups both times and I’ll be hanged if I can navigate the NPR Web site to extract such seemingly trivial information. You’d think these kinds of things would be simple. The search function under the Archives heading is getting me nowhere. Short of buying a transcript, is there any way to use the freakin’ site to find out what music was played between such and such a time on such and such a date? (That’s asking a lot, I know.)

Being Read

Last year MIT published Eloquent Images, an essay collection that includes my chapter on “The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction.” Print publishing has such a different dynamic: if I write something here on my blog, people react with comments. If I write something for ebr (say) I get email, and maybe a threaded response. If I write something for print I get silence, then the reviews come in. So the other week, Googling around, I came across a review of the volume in Leonardo. It’s written by Dene Grigar, who I know passingly through the Electronic Literature Organization. Turns out I must have done a pretty poor job:

What bothers me about this is not that she didn’t care for my argument or approach, but that the review proceeds by caricature. “Images are not texts because they do not behave as texts do for Humanities Computing experts.” Really? I mean, really? “The qualities of text that Humanities Computing scholars value and understand are the qualities that must be found in images and should be valued and understood by all other scholars.” Why would anyone make such an argument? Would anyone who knows my work think I would make such an argument? Would such an argument, having been made by anyone (for whatever inexplicable reason), really have proven compelling to the volume’s editors? To the press’s review board? Would no one have raised an eyebrow or asked for a revision or two along the way? And by the way, are we capitalizing Humanities Computing to take the pointy-headed authority of that field down a notch or two?

Of course that’s not what I argued, or wrote. (Nor did I capitalize Humanities Computing.) The piece is, in fact, very much in line with the tradition of textual materiality developed by scholars like Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, and Kate Hayles—but that point seems to have been lost on Grigar (go check page 149). Still, there are always more reviews. Here’s one I like better (you’ll have to scroll about 2/3 of the way down, it’s print page 104).

Blogging Clicks With Colleges

In today’s Washington Post (free subscription required). Quoth Kirschenbaum:

It’s the plugged-in version of a long tradition in literature, said wiki user Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. Hundreds of years ago people kept “commonplace books,” in which they would write down poems, passages from books, and observations to share. Most people think of writing as solitary, he said — “the lonely poet taking long walks in the woods, but there’s another type of writing that’s social and reactive.”

The talented Mr. Bowen gets the nod too.

Wakey Wakey

Been quiet around here, huh?

Content coming soon, really. Just been busy, with good things.

In the meantime, amuse yourself with the how-quick-are-you tester in the righthand margin. Sort of a low-rent EMG. It’s kind of addictive. Best I’ve ever managed is .29, and that only once. Usually I’m up somewhere around .3x, and apparently that’s not very impressive. Let me know if you do better.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, yes, I’m still restless about textons and scriptons. But so is Matt Bowen, and he’s done something about it.

Institute for the Future of the Book and Textually.org

Via GTA: The Institute for the Future of the Book, the new sandbox for Voyager founder Bob Stein.

Via Jill: Textually.org, “all about texting, SMS, and MMS”