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.”

In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing— always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.

Writing in the digital age has been as messy as the inky rags in Gutenberg’s shop or the molten lead of a Linotype machine. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the early adopters, and what made others anxious? Was word processing just a better typewriter, or something more?

"Don''t look now, but your fingerprints are all over the cover of this book. Simply picking it up off the shelf to read the cover has left a trail of evidence that you were here. "If you think book covers are bad, computers are worse. Every time you use a computer, you leave elephant-sized tracks all over it. As Dan and Wietse show, even people trying to be sneaky leave evidence all over, sometimes in surprising places. "This book is about computer archeology. It''s about finding out what might have been based on what is left behind. So pick up a tool and dig in. There''s plenty to learn from these masters of computer security." --Gary McGraw, Ph.D., CTO, Cigital, coauthor of Exploiting Software and Building Secure Software "A wonderful book. Beyond its obvious uses, it also teaches a great deal about operating system internals." --Steve Bellovin, coauthor of Firewalls and Internet Security, Second Edition, and Columbia University professor "A must-have reference book for anyone doing computer forensics. Dan and Wietse have done an excellent job of taking the guesswork out of a difficult topic." --Brad Powell, chief security architect, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Farmer and Venema provide the essential guide to ''fossil'' data. Not only do they clearly describe what you can find during a forensic investigation, they also provide research found nowhere else about how long data remains on disk and in memory. If you ever expect to look at an exploited system, I highly recommend reading this book." --Rik Farrow, Consultant, author of Internet Security for Home and Office "Farmer and Venema do for digital archaeology what Indiana Jones did for historical archaeology. Forensic Discovery unearths hidden treasures in enlightening and entertaining ways, showing how a time-centric approach to computer forensics reveals even the cleverest intruder." --Richard Bejtlich, technical director, ManTech CFIA, and author of The Tao of Network Security Monitoring "Farmer and Venema are ''hackers'' of the old school: They delight in understanding computers at every level and finding new ways to apply existing information and tools to the solution of complex problems." --Muffy Barkocy, Senior Web Developer, Shopping.com "This book presents digital forensics from a unique perspective because it examines the systems that create digital evidence in addition to the techniques used to find it. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about digital evidence from UNIX systems." --Brian Carrier, digital forensics researcher, and author of File System Forensic Analysis The Definitive Guide to Computer Forensics: Theory and Hands-On Practice Computer forensics--the art and science of gathering and analyzing digital evidence, reconstructing data and attacks, and tracking perpetrators--is becoming ever more important as IT and law enforcement professionals face an epidemic in computer crime. In Forensic Discovery, two internationally recognized experts present a thorough and realistic guide to the subject. Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema cover both theory and hands-on practice, introducing a powerful approach that can often recover evidence considered lost forever. The authors draw on their extensive firsthand experience to cover everything from file systems, to memory and kernel hacks, to malware. They expose a wide variety of computer forensics myths that often stand in the way of success. Readers will find extensive examples from Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, and Microsoft Windows, as well as practical guidance for writing one''s own forensic tools. The authors are singularly well-qualified to write this book: They personally created some of the most popular security tools ever written, from the legendary SATAN network scanner to the powerful Coroner''s Toolkit for analyzing UNIX break-ins. After reading this book you will be able to Understand essential forensics concepts: volatility, layering, and trust Gather the maximum amount of reliable evidence from a running system Recover partially destroyed information--and make sense of it Timeline your system: understand what really happened when Uncover secret changes to everything from system utilities to kernel modules Avoid cover-ups and evidence traps set by intruders Identify the digital footprints associated with suspicious activity Understand file systems from a forensic analyst''s point of view Analyze malware--without giving it a chance to escape Capture and examine the contents of main memory on running systems Walk through the unraveling of an intrusion, one step at a time The book''s companion Web site contains complete source and binary code for open source software discussed in the book, plus additional computer forensics case studies and resource links.

Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries. Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book. Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.

There has been an explosion in the creation and use of digital media over the past quarter century and in particular over the past decade. As the varieties of digital media multiply, scholars are beginning to examine its origins, organization, and preservation, which present new challenges compared to the organization and preservation of traditional media such as books, papers, films, photographs, music scores, and works of art. In order to examine from multiple perspectives issues related to history, preservation, and ontology of digital media, editors of this volume organized an invitation-only workshop on digital media. The participants were carefully chosen to represent a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, ranging from humanities to informationstudies to technology to history to communication theory to fine arts. The book is organized in four parts, each representing a different perspective on digital media: preservation, interaction, organization, and history. The preservation section considers the problems of archiving digital media for long-term preservation. Many digital objects are readily copied but are fragile and not designed for preservation, and this nature of digital objects provides both challenges and opportunities for adapting archival practice. The remaining sections look at the interaction between technological changes and cultural practices, the organization of digital media, and the history of digital media and how technology has changed over time. The wealth of varied perspectives collected together in this volume provides new light on the topic of digital media.

This volume reads the global urban environment through mediated sonic practices to put a contemporary spin on acoustic ecology’s investigations at the intersection of space, cultures, technology, and the senses. Acoustic ecology is an interdisciplinary framework from the 1970s for documenting, analyzing, and transforming sonic environments: an early model of the cross-boundary thinking and multi-modal practices now common across the digital humanities. With the recent emergence of sound studies and the expansion of “ecological” thinking, there is an increased urgency to re-discover and contemporize the acoustic ecology tradition. This book serves as a comprehensive investigation into the ways in which current scholars working with sound are re-inventing acoustic ecology across diverse fields, drawing on acoustic ecology’s focus on sensory experience, place, and applied research, as well as attendance to mediatized practices in sounded space. From sounding out the Anthropocene, to rethinking our auditory media landscapes, to exploring citizenship and community, this volume brings the original acoustic ecology problem set into the contemporary landscape of sound studies.