Thread by @mkirschenbaum

Herewith, a thread that is a kind of "reader's guide" to BITSTREAMS. It's a short book, yes, but still: different constituencies might benefit from a better sense of what's in there (and where). Here's the @PennPress catalog page for the general overview: upenn.edu/pennpress/book…

The book is based on my 2016 Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Each "lecture" has been revised and expanded-- there's really only a passing resemblance to the originals. library.upenn.edu/about/exhibits…

Nonetheless, the three original lectures survive in the three main chapters, and each rests on a distinctive discursive formation: the archive, the computer, and the book. (Of course the work of the book is precisely in the dismantling of the definite article that precedes each.)

The Introduction treats my use of the term "bitstream," which is a kind of surrogate for computational artifacts of whatever shape and scope. In computing, a bitstream is any contiguous sequence of ones and zeros. A file is thus a bitstream.

There are two key points that are made: the first is that our ongoing access to the bitstream exists *because of* and not despite its material conveyances. The second is that computers have been around long enough that we can now *historicize* the bitstream.

Which is to say: recovering data from 1960s-era magnetic tape is a different prospect than recovering it from a 1980s-era floppy-- and both are different again from recovering data from today's cloud services. Textual scholarship should begin acknowledging these distinctions.

Chapter 1 then takes the reader into "the" archive, in the form of a visit to the reading room at Princeton where all access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is via digital surrogates accessed on a stand-alone workstation.

I describe the process of reconstructing the composition of the novel's famous final lines through use of *both* manuscript and born-digital evidence-- but *all* of it delivered electronically, via the strange torqueing of the bitstream.

The chapter draws heavily on archival theory (as written by actual archivists!) and seeks to disentangle different senses of *the* archive and its transformative into a transitive (i.e., our latter-day notion of "archiving" something).

Key interlocutors in Chapter 1 include @professorcaz, @whkchun, @bruces, @amplify285, and (yes) Jacques Derrida, among others.

Chapter 2 tells the intertwined stories of two poets, William H. Dickey and Kamau Brathwaite, who (to the best of my knowledge) never met and had little in common, but both of whom began using the same make and model of Macintosh computer within a year of one another.

The chapter also tells the story of desktop publishing, the much celebrated "killer app" for the Mac. It explains why computer magazines (in the mid-1980s) were filled with references to Gutenberg, and why users of Aldus PageMaker were treated to an 8-bit image of Manutius.

Finally, the chapter explores both Dickey and Brathwaite's complex relations to paper and screen, as a function of their literary legacies-- Brathwaite's many books are generally easy to find, though few were published to his satisfaction and standard;

and Dickey's 14 "lost" HyperCard poems, which were restored on the @internetarchive as part of this work: archive.org/details/willia… and archive.org/details/willia…. Of direct interest to #elit and the @eliterature community.

Chapter 3 is less about an author than an entity, one typically invisible in book publishing: so-called "book packagers." My case study here is Melcher Media @melcher_media, who has made a mark in the industry with their dazzling recreations of seemingly much older book objects.

In dialogue with @jesspres, @striphas, Garrett Stewart, Simone Murray, and others, this work also owes much to my work on what I termed "bibliologistics" and which resulted in the BOOKS.FILES report I wrote on industry management of born-digital assets: google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j…

The case study is Abrams and Dorst's S., or Ship of Theseus, about which much has already been written (not all of it admiring), but which generally eschews attention to the *actual* circumstances of this book's making in favor of its meta-fictional conceits.

I tell the opposite side of the story, and detail my argument for why books today are in fact "bookish media"-- a formulation I see as a sort of inverse of @jesspres's "bookishness." Bookish media sees bookish identity as sublimated by the medial aspects of global supply chains.

Finally, there is a newly written Coda entitled "The Postulate of Normality in Exceptional Times." Finishing this book during a pandemic, a domestic political crisis, and a summer of racial violence, I struggled with the question of what relevance my bibliographical projects had.

Using Bowers' chimerical conceit of "normality" as a jumping off point, I address the nature of bibliographical evidence, especially with regard to the "normalcy" we expect from (supposedly infallible) computational operations.

But that's not where the book ends, either. It ends, rather, with what I call "the terrible specificity of curbsides," and the remembering (what Toni Morrison called a rememory) of a lethal act of racist violence on my own campus--

--an essential obligation, in my view, for a book dedicated (as this one is) to "my colleagues and students at the University of Maryland." The book thus ends with the always exceptionality of time and place-- including this one, now, here.

Here’s an 20% off discount code when ordering direct from @PennPress: FA21PP 😊