Digital Humanities Lab

Literary History of Word Processing

June 20, 2016

"Locating the Literary History of Word Processing
(Hint: It's Not in Special Collections)"

June 20 at 10:30-11:30am in Yale Center for British Art, Lecture Hall

Matthew Kirschenbaum will discuss what it means to do scholarship at the intersection of literary and technological history, working with floppy disks, tipsters, museum curators, journalists, LexisNexis, writers, editors, old computers bought on eBay, a former speech writer for Newt Gingrich, a billionaire, and multiple pairs of unseen hands. In the talk, he will also describe the research process for his recent book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing.

The event is open to the public and is sponsored by the Born Digital Working Group as part of a series to train staff and increase awareness of the issues, challenges, and opportunities related to born-digital materials.

----

Matthew Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He is also a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. In addition to Track Changes (2016), he is the author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) and was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

External link: