Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Author:Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-18T22:15:00+00:00

While it is tempting to linger over the detail that Afternoon was composed entirely electronically, at the same time this description reveals a much more heterogeneous scene of writing, both more intimate and more implicated in a complex documentary setting and the rhythms of a working day. The ability to sketch freehand, to jot notes on what surfaces are at hand (like the back of a memo), and the way in which these surfaces are part of a larger, domestic environment-one of the manuscript pages at the Ransom Center features a prominent coffee cup stain-suggest a kind of hybrid textuality, fingers first gripping a pencil, now tapping at keys. This point is more than merely recherche, for it has implications not only for how we think about electronic textuality, but also what it means to preserve it. The scene of writing we can reconstruct on the desktops both of and around Joyce's Macintosh is also, I would argue, a familiar one to the student of writing, who knows that Christian saints were often depicted in paintings at work in their studies, surrounded by a mass of books, papers, implements, and furnishings or other specialized tools designed to facilitate reading and writing. Despite the electronic pedigree of the actual text, Afternoon's story space and its written remainder extend well beyond the edge of a screen.

Joyce gave out several dozen copies of what has since become known as the first edition of Afternoon at the ACM Hypertext conference in late 1987. A second edition, which was the basis for the first commercial edition published by Eastgate Systems in 1990, was apparently distributed at the 1989 Hypertext meetings in Pittsburgh. A comparison of the first edition of Afternoon with a copy of the first Eastgate edition (the third edition proper) reveals several immediately observable differences:42 the third edition includes a 20-kilobyte bitmapped graphic on its electronic frontispiece; the number of textual nodes has increased marginally, from 536 to 539;43 the number of links, however, has increased by nearly a hundred, from 854 to 951. The electronic size of the work has also grown, from 235 kilobytes in the first edition to 375 kilobytes in the third. There are a number of minor textual variants. The spelling of "crysalis" in the "winter" node has been corrected to "chrysalis." The spell ing of "temperment" in "winter 2" has been corrected to "temperament." And there are several dozen more such changes-all typos, misspellings, and the occasional piece of punctuation (perhaps the most amusing of these is the correction of "pantyhose" from "pantyhouse" in the "Siren" lexia).44 While these changes are trivial (accidentals, in the parlance of textual criticism), their very plainness-one can almost conjure Joyce's fingers on the keyboard as he backspaces and edits at some later date-bespeaks the diachronic nature of electronic objects. A more substantive textual variant is to be found in the lexia titled "moon," where the phrase "god rest his soul" has been added to the parenthetical aside that begins "my friend joel, for one.

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