Accolades Accumulate for Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms has received awards from the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008) continues to impress as a landmark book of 2008. The latest praise for Mechanisms comes from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). At SHARP's annual conference in Toronto, June 23-27, Kirschenbaum received SHARP's DeLong Prize for the best work in the field of book history in 2008.

This is the latest in high praise for Mechanisms. Earlier this year Kirschenbaum received the Richard J. Finneran Memorial Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship at its biennial conference in New York, March 18-21. The award is in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the preceding two calendar years (2007-2008).

Of Kirschenbaum's ability to draw the "symmetries and asymmetries that define the relation of paper-based and digital technologies," Jerome McGann says, "Kirschenbaum's lucid book engages trenchantly with these important and pressing matters."

In other news, Kirschenbaum recently won a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to write a report entitled "Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections," to be co-authored with scholars from the Bodleian Libray and the Harry Ransom Center. This project will result in a conference at the University of Maryland in spring 2010.

Read more about Mechanisms at Kirschenbaum's blog here.