MITH Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum completed a Fellowship project in 2004-05, which consisted of research toward the completion of his first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Mechanisms was published by the MIT Press in early 2008.
Taking its cues from textual studies and recent critical interest in writing and inscription technologies, Mechanisms addresses itself to the material and historical particulars of landmark works of new media and electronic literature, applying computer forensics to conduct new kinds of media-specific readings and drawing on significant new archival sources for works like Michael Joyce’s Afternoon and William Gibson’s electronic poem “Agrippa.” Mechanisms has won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA).