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.
A persistent theme is that bits--the ubiquitous ones and zeros of
computing--are never self-identical, but always inflected by the
material realities of particular systems, platforms, and protocols.
These materialities are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on
which we stake the enterprise for preserving the future of literary
heritage.
