Primrose Road

An article entitled "Hamlet.doc? Literature in a Digital Age" appeared in the 8/17 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Credit where credit is due: I first spotted this article on Shakespeare Geek, where it was blogged on Friday.)

Kirschenbaum first asks what Microsoft Word means for 'authorial intention' (i.e. can we resurrect the Author/author justalittle?); we now have strong evidence (still not proof) of when a document was created and how long an author might have worked on it. On the other side of the coin, Word slightly screws up the process of blind peer review, a factor that the MLA had to address. And I agree that 'track changes' functions are tricky as well: I'm not sure that I'd have wanted my committee to know about the "joke" chapter titles I initially set up while writing my master's thesis. ;)

In any case, I have one major point of contention with the article: Kirschenbaum's claim that computers "are machines designed to imitate other machines." I'm not going to go into too much detail here because of my 'no dissertation material on the blog' rule, but see Mark B.N. Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media for a useful critique of the use of cinematic/videographic metaphors in theorizing new media.