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Index
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: "AWARENESS OF THE MECHANISM"
1 "EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE": STORAGE, INSCRIPTION, AND COMPUTER FORENSICS
2 EXTREME INSCRIPTION: A GRAMMATOLOGY OF THE HARD DRIVE
3 "AN OLD HOUSE WITH MANY ROOMS": THE TEXTUAL FORENSICS OF MYSTERY HOUSE.DSK
4 SAVE AS: MICHAEL JOYCE'S AFTERNOONS
5 TEXT MESSAGING: THE TRANSFORMISSIONS OF "AGRIPPA"
CODA: THE FORENSIC IMAGINATION
APPENDIX 261
WORKS CITED
INDEX
william gibson agrippa. Type this string into any search engine and you will get dozens of hits on t
Of course the inevitable happened. Almost immediately, the text of Gibson's poem was "cracked" by ha
cardboard. The cloth-covered linen boards of the volume, distressed and artificially aged by burn ma
The interior of the book includes some forty-four pages printed in double columns with the lines o
We will seek to open many black boxes in the pages that follow. In late 2001, stories began circulat
hoped that tracing the source of those transactions might lead to persons with advance knowledge of
According to company executive Peter Henschel, "The fine dust that was everywhere in the area got
were reportedly paying up to $30,000 to have their data restored. Thus the cold truth of modern da
repeatability, and survivability.'
In what follows, I have tried to write a different kind of book about electronic textuality, one tha
Mechanisms is therefore a study of new media, but one that takes its cues not only from the digita
texts) have been created and reproduced, how books have been disseminated and read, how books have b
Text Processing (vol. 13, no. 2, 2004: 95-125). Individual passages in chapter 4 and elsewhere in th
Begin with a mechanism, just the kind you would expect: gears and combteeth wheels. The Recodable Lo
While MEMS devices operate on the micron scale, there is an even lower plane of technological develo
"A nanoscale wire or circuit," explain Mark and Daniel Ratner, "does not necessarily obey Ohm's la
The nanoscale is now the venue for exotic writing techniques fusing inscription and fabrication. Her
Dip-pen lithography achieves its ultraprecision by placing tips coated with the material to be depos
In an essay on digital preservation, Kenneth Thibodeau, Director of Electronic Records Programs at t
My reading of the critical literature on new media suggests that the field has focused primarily on
Storage: the word itself is dull and flat sounding, like footfalls on linoleum. It has a vague indus
sky such that a shell can be fired to intercept it), not recollection and storage; they only became
Storage is also a kind of imaginary, a focalized expression of the collecting impulse underpinning
"' Crucially, storage today is both an accessory, something you hold in your hand or slip into you
German radio codes, thereby paving the way for the Cold War).12
In ways that are not unlike those of Nicholas Negroponte or even Bill Gates, Kittler offers up a n
13 Despite having memorably claimed that there is no software, Kittler's attention nowadays has tu
"Man of the Year" in 1982. Disney's Tron was likewise released in 1982, literalizing the fantasies o
That last term, materiality, will be a watchword of the book. The questions I pursue here have their
Formal materiality is perhaps the more difficult term, as its selfcontradictory appellation might su
"Instead of manipulating matter, the computer allows us to manipulate symbols."
18 This point, basic to all aspects of computer science, comes in the opening lines of textbook on
Bits are-in other words-symbols to be set and reset, set and reset, on again and off again, over a
will see when we look more closely at the operation of hard drives, computers are not flawless. Erro
While it may seem tempting to associate forensic and formal materiality with hardware and software r
distinction between hardware and software as we know it today, though seemingly naturalized by the v
laborations, intuitive insights, professionalized expertise, venture capital (in other words, money)
approach may seem odd or obscure. But in fact, textual studies should be recognized as among the mos
But though recent years have seen a tremendous acceleration of interest (and much practical progre
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