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Book Launch: Matthew Kirschenbaum, BITSTREAMS: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL LITERARY HERITAGE

Matthew Kirschenbaum book cover

Book Launch: Matthew Kirschenbaum, BITSTREAMS: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL LITERARY HERITAGE

College of Arts and Humanities | English Wednesday, October 20, 2021 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Virtual

Join the book launch for Matthew Kirschenbaum's new book BITSTREAMS: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL LITERARY HERITAGE (University of Pennsylvania Press). Matthew Kirschenbaum will be in conversation with Marisa Parham.

Watch the Event:

From the publisher:

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.

 

Add to Calendar 10/20/21 12:00 PM 10/20/21 1:00 PM America/New_York Book Launch: Matthew Kirschenbaum, BITSTREAMS: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL LITERARY HERITAGE

Join the book launch for Matthew Kirschenbaum's new book BITSTREAMS: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL LITERARY HERITAGE (University of Pennsylvania Press). Matthew Kirschenbaum will be in conversation with Marisa Parham.

Watch the Event:

From the publisher:

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.

 

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