Digital Materiality

Abstract

An awareness that communication is always a mediated experience, combined with the skills of forensic analysis and bibliographic imagination, is as relevant to books as to any other material form, including electronic records. At the heart of the critical enterprise is an understanding of digital materiality, not framed as the intangibility of cyberspace using the superficial distinction between physical, surrogate, and virtual, but as the palpable bits and bytes of electronic hardware and software that are ubiquitous, that leave traces, and that can be read as evidence of the creation, dissemination, reception, and preservation of these new communication forms. Scholars like Matt Kirschenbaum and Alan Galey have rendered digital forensics necessary for the digital humanist's intellectual toolkit. This chapter surveys and extends those understandings by exploring how digital materiality is captured in metadata, in interfaces, in time- and date-stamped information processing, in the multivariate interactions of users and forms. In effect, digital documents reveal their own stories if you know where to look, what to analyze, and how to read their material legacy.

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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.