Ordinary Media is thrilled to announce “Word Processing as Ordinary Media” as the inaugural event of the research workshop. From the dust jacket of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016): “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?”
Matthew Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. A prominent figure in the digital humanities, new media studies, textual scholarship, and game studies, his first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008), won the 16th Annual Prize for a First Book from the MLA. At Maryland, Kirschenbaum serves as Associate Director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), an internationally recognized digital humanities institute. In addition to a major edited collection entitled Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (MIT, 2016), his second book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing with Harvard University Press has just been published this month.
This event is generously sponsored by: the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Northwestern University Library, the departments of English, Art History, and Radio/Television/Film, the programs in Comparative Literary Studies and Screen Cultures, and NUDHL (Northwestern Digital Humanities Laboratory).