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?

"While the purview of digital forensics was once specialized to fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defense, the increasing ubiquity of computers and electronic devices means that digital forensics is now used in a wide variety of cases and circumstances. Most records today are born digital, and libraries and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media as part of their acquisition of "papers" from writers, scholars, scientists, musicians, and public figures. This poses new challenges to librarians, archivists, and curators--challenges related to accessing and preserving legacy formats, recovering data, ensuring authenticity, and maintaining trust. The methods and tools developed by forensics experts represent a novel approach to these demands. For example, the same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect's hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession. This report introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence."--Publisher's website.

While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, Digital Modernism provides an alternative genealogy. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter to demonstrate how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. Accordingly, Digital Modernism makes the case for considering these digital creations as "literature" and argues for the value of reading them carefully, closely, and within literary history.

Living in a networked world means never really getting to decide in any thoroughgoing way who or what enters your “space” (your laptop, your iPhone, your thermostat . . . your home). With this as a basic frame-of-reference, James J. Brown’s Ethical Programs examines and explores the rhetorical potential and problems of a hospitality ethos suited to a new era of hosts and guests. Brown reads a range of computational strategies and actors, from the general principles underwriting the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which determines how packets of information can travel through the internet, to the Obama election campaign’s use of the power of protocols to reach voters, harvest their data, incentivize and, ultimately, shape their participation in the campaign. In demonstrating the kind of rhetorical spaces networked software establishes and the access it permits, prevents, and molds, Brown makes a significant contribution to the emergent discourse of software studies as a major component of efforts in broad fields including media studies, rhetorical studies, and cultural studies.

Finalist in the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Social Sciences category Romantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism's role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by—while simultaneously shaping considerably—new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media.