Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage

by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

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.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tried to skim quickly & opportunistically to answer a few Qs for my diss but ended up getting sucked in by so many of the details that I thought I should log this book as having actually been "read" -- the readerly pleasures of Kirchenbaum's minute details really do make their own compelling argument for the value of bibliography as "an uncompromising commitment to the individuality of all things, every instance, every copy" (111). And I'll certainly use ch1 when teaching Morrison's Beloved.

[Colin Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an effective crystallization of Kirschenbaum’s scholarship to date, while also pointing outward to new directions for the study of the archival afterlives of post-digital literature. Building on the breezier, more narrative-driven recounting of word processing from his last book, Kirschenbaum continues in this vein: telling richly detailed stories about authors’ intertwinglings with digital technology and ruminating on the implications for bibliography. The William Dickey/Kamau Brathwaite centerpiece was the strongest but all three chapters are stellar.

These were based on three lectures, but Kirschenbaum adds a powerful coda about the state of bibliography in 2020–‘bibliography is as big as the world, but the world is bigger than bibliography.’