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.

In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing- always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.

About the Author
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination and Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. He is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Reviews
Matthew Kirschenbaum has almost single-handedly taught us how to read digital objects as material texts. Now, in this field-defining achievement, he shows us the future of bibliography. Like the works of D. F. McKenzie before it, Bitstreams will be required reading for generations to come. * Whitney Trettien, University of Pennsylvania *


Awards
Commended for Honorable Mention for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism by the Electronic Literature Organization 2022 (United States). Short-listed for Shortlisted for the DeLong History Book prize, granted by SHARP 2022 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780812224955
Author Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Format Paperback
Page Count 160
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press