A Literary History of Word Processing
368 pages
English language
Published Dec. 6, 2016
The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?
Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with …
The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?
Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.
Es ist eher eine interessante Materialsammlung, die mühsam in buchähnliche Form gebracht wurde. Viele, viele Zitate von und Tidbits über Autoren. Die Geschichte der Textverarbeitung endet überraschend früh, eigentlich noch vor den 1990er Jahren. Aber wenn man es eher als Nachschlagewerk oder Materialsteinbruch benutzen möchte, sehr gut.
Nope, this is not about emacs vs. vim. Rather you can learn about the long road that started at (electrical) typewriters, lead to typewriters that feature magnetic tape storage all the way to the first versions of MS Word.
If you're someone who spends a lot of time doing word processing - and if you're reading this the chances for that are good - then you'll find a super interesting history in this book.
