mae
12-26-2011, 04:58 PM
http://www.theverge.com/culture/2011/12/26/2661729/word-processor-literature-history-book
In 1983, Stephen King published "The Word Processor," which hinged on the ability of the device to insert or delete words without leaving a trace. According to Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, the story — perhaps the first to use the word processor as a plot point — reflects how the machine allowed the author to literally "play God," creating fully-formed documents without the messiness of visible edits. Kirschenbaum's Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, scheduled for publication in 2013, will explore the impact of word processing on King and other early adopters, uncovering which authors were the first to use the technology and how it may have shaped their writing.
Kirschenbaum, recently profiled in the New York Times, sees his book as a continuation of other research on the history of writing implements like the typewriter. But while typewritten pages can at least be easily read if they're found, the ephemeral nature of word processing makes it particularly difficult to get early examples of it. Frank Herbert, for example, allegedly submitted work in the '70s on 8-inch floppy disks, but the data on them would be difficult to recover even if they were ever found. This makes it difficult to tell who was the first to use the word processor.
In addition to acquiring and refurbishing dozens of ancient machines for his work, Kirschenbaum has gained access to Microsoft's corporate archive, where he hopes to find the origin of spell-check, change tracking, and other features we now take for granted. He's also put out a call for sources on his blog. There's plenty more about his project at the links below, including full audio of a recent talk at the New York Public Library.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time.
Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s.
“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”
The lecture was drawn from Mr. Kirschenbaum’s book “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,” which Harvard University Press is set to publish in 2013, or as soon as he can finish tapping it out on his iBuyPower 64-bit laptop, and on the vintage computers he has assembled at the university’s College Park campus, where he is also the associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
So far Mr. Kirschenbaum has acquired some two-dozen machines, including an Osborne, a Kaypro, a Tandy, an early TRS-80 laptop and an Apple IIe and IIc, along with the technological folk wisdom necessary to keep them working. When his Macintosh Classics went on the fritz, Mr. Kirschenbaum had a grad student pop the motherboards into the dishwasher.
“Putting it through the rinse cycle did the trick,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in an interview. “It removed some of the corrosion that had accumulated.”
Uncovering a clean answer to the question “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?” is a trickier business, though Mr. Kirschenbaum has promising leads. Through his agent he recently heard that the science-fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of “Dune,” who died in 1986, may have submitted work to his publisher in the late 1970s on 8-inch floppy disks.
“I’m following up on that,” he said, though he holds out little hope that the disks — much less the data they contain — can be recovered.
“There’s going to be a window from the first couple of decades of personal computing when people weren’t thinking” about preservation, he added. “A lot of material from that era may wind up being lost.”
The study of word processing may sound like a peculiarly tech-minded task for an English professor, but literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it, whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments. (“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche typed.)
Some scholars have argued that Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” described in its introduction as cobbled together from a “mass of typewriting” dictated to the fictional Mina Harker, is really an allegory of the vampiric nature of modern communications media. Others have attributed the tangled style of Henry James’s late novels to his method of dictating them aloud to a “typewriter,” a term used at the time both to describe the machine itself and the person, usually a woman, operating it.
If it’s harder to think of word processing than typewriting in literary terms, that may be because we’re too fully enmeshed in the technology, said Darren Wershler, the research chairman in media and contemporary literature at Concordia University in Montreal and the author of “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.”
“Writing about word processing when that’s how you write is like trying to write about your own hand,” Mr. Wershler said. “It’s easier to talk about how things used to work than how they work now.”
Mr. Kirschenbaum, whose earlier book, “Mechanisms,” analyzed experimental electronic writing, said he was less interested in analyzing the stylistic impact of word processing than in recovering its early history, particularly its adoption by mainstream writers. And in his lecture, sponsored by NYPL Labs, a unit of the library devoted to experimental technology, he ticked off some of the better-documented moments in that history. Tom Clancy wrote his 1984 thriller “The Hunt for Red October,” often cited as one of the earliest word-processed best sellers, on an Apple IIe, using WordStar software. And Jimmy Carter set off what may have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir in progress by hitting the wrong keys on his brand-new $12,000 Lanier, a calamity noted in The New York Times.
Given the spottiness of the record Mr. Kirschenbaum is hesitant to proclaim Mr. King the computer-age equivalent of Mark Twain, the first major American writer to complete a work using the new technology. But Mr. King’s 1983 short story “The Word Processor,” Mr. Kirschenbaum ventured, is “likely the earliest fictional treatment of word processing by a prominent English-language author.”
The story, published in Playboy (later retitled “Word Processor of the Gods”), certainly captured the unsettling ghostliness of the new technology, which allowed writers to correct themselves without leaving even the faintest trace. In the story a frustrated schoolteacher discovers that by erasing sentences about his enemies he can delete them entirely from the universe and insert himself in their place, a reflection of Mr. King’s fascination with his Wang System 5’s “insert,” ”delete” and “execute” keys, recounted in the introduction to his 1985 story collection, “Skeleton Crew.” “Writers are used to playing God, but suddenly now the metaphor was literal,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in the lecture.
On a more mundane level Mr. Kirschenbaum has received permission to use the corporate archive at Microsoft, where he hopes to trace the marketing rhetoric that helped create a near-mystical aura around a product designed primarily for the ordinary world of the office. (“More than words,” promised one early slogan for Microsoft Word.) He also wants to pinpoint the beginnings of features now taken for granted, like spell-checking and track changes, not to mention the rise and fall of Clippy, the demonically cheerful animated paper-clip “helper” hatched by Microsoft in 1997 and subsequently killed off in numerous gleeful parodies.
The literary world is full of analog holdouts clinging to their Olympias. But word processing may be less amenable to the kind of fetishism surrounding older writing tools.
“People treasure old, weird typewriters,” Mr. Wershler said. “But you throw out a computer, and it’s gone. It’s sitting in a pile of toxic rubble in India.”
Mr. King’s first computer — a boxy behemoth with a beige molded casing, built-in monochrome screen, and $11,500 price tag — has enjoyed a certain cultish afterlife. “I am in negotiations to buy Stephen King’s Wang,” a dealer of antiquarian computers announces in William Gibson’s 2003 cyberpunk classic “Pattern Recognition.”
Collectors searching for the real thing, however, are out of luck. The machine went to California in the late 1990s for data retrieval and never made it back, Mr. Kirschenbaum was dismayed to learn from Mr. King’s assistant a few years ago.
Still, Mr. Kirschenbaum said he hopes to acquire a similar specimen before his project is finished.
“There’s a lot of affection for that computer,” he said. “It’s rare to even see them for sale.”
http://www.archive.org/details/2011-12-stephen-kings-wang
Mark Twain famously prepared the manuscript for Life on the Mississippi with his new Remington typewriter, and today we recognize that typewriting changed the material culture (and the economy) of authorship. But when did literary writers begin using word processors? Who were the early adopters? How did the technology change their relation to their craft? Was the computer just a better typewriter, or was it something more? This talk, drawn from the speaker’s forthcoming book on the subject, will provide some answers, and also address questions related to the challenges of conducting research at the intersection of literary and technological history.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.
http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/history-of-word-processing-your-assitance-needed/
Greetings. As described in Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times story “The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute,” I am in the midst of researching and writing a book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book is under contract to Harvard University Press, and should be out in late 2013. You can listen to a talk I recently gave at the New York Public Library based on the first chapter, “Stephen King’s Wang,” here.
The book documents the moment at which large numbers of literary writers began making the transition from typewriters to word processors and personal computers (late 1970s, early 1980s). I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:
authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute;
anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).
If you would like to offer information, anecdotes, corrections, or tips about things to look at or persons to contact, please write to me at mkirschenbaum at gmail dot com. Thank you for reading.
In 1983, Stephen King published "The Word Processor," which hinged on the ability of the device to insert or delete words without leaving a trace. According to Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, the story — perhaps the first to use the word processor as a plot point — reflects how the machine allowed the author to literally "play God," creating fully-formed documents without the messiness of visible edits. Kirschenbaum's Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, scheduled for publication in 2013, will explore the impact of word processing on King and other early adopters, uncovering which authors were the first to use the technology and how it may have shaped their writing.
Kirschenbaum, recently profiled in the New York Times, sees his book as a continuation of other research on the history of writing implements like the typewriter. But while typewritten pages can at least be easily read if they're found, the ephemeral nature of word processing makes it particularly difficult to get early examples of it. Frank Herbert, for example, allegedly submitted work in the '70s on 8-inch floppy disks, but the data on them would be difficult to recover even if they were ever found. This makes it difficult to tell who was the first to use the word processor.
In addition to acquiring and refurbishing dozens of ancient machines for his work, Kirschenbaum has gained access to Microsoft's corporate archive, where he hopes to find the origin of spell-check, change tracking, and other features we now take for granted. He's also put out a call for sources on his blog. There's plenty more about his project at the links below, including full audio of a recent talk at the New York Public Library.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time.
Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s.
“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”
The lecture was drawn from Mr. Kirschenbaum’s book “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,” which Harvard University Press is set to publish in 2013, or as soon as he can finish tapping it out on his iBuyPower 64-bit laptop, and on the vintage computers he has assembled at the university’s College Park campus, where he is also the associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
So far Mr. Kirschenbaum has acquired some two-dozen machines, including an Osborne, a Kaypro, a Tandy, an early TRS-80 laptop and an Apple IIe and IIc, along with the technological folk wisdom necessary to keep them working. When his Macintosh Classics went on the fritz, Mr. Kirschenbaum had a grad student pop the motherboards into the dishwasher.
“Putting it through the rinse cycle did the trick,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in an interview. “It removed some of the corrosion that had accumulated.”
Uncovering a clean answer to the question “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?” is a trickier business, though Mr. Kirschenbaum has promising leads. Through his agent he recently heard that the science-fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of “Dune,” who died in 1986, may have submitted work to his publisher in the late 1970s on 8-inch floppy disks.
“I’m following up on that,” he said, though he holds out little hope that the disks — much less the data they contain — can be recovered.
“There’s going to be a window from the first couple of decades of personal computing when people weren’t thinking” about preservation, he added. “A lot of material from that era may wind up being lost.”
The study of word processing may sound like a peculiarly tech-minded task for an English professor, but literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it, whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments. (“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche typed.)
Some scholars have argued that Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” described in its introduction as cobbled together from a “mass of typewriting” dictated to the fictional Mina Harker, is really an allegory of the vampiric nature of modern communications media. Others have attributed the tangled style of Henry James’s late novels to his method of dictating them aloud to a “typewriter,” a term used at the time both to describe the machine itself and the person, usually a woman, operating it.
If it’s harder to think of word processing than typewriting in literary terms, that may be because we’re too fully enmeshed in the technology, said Darren Wershler, the research chairman in media and contemporary literature at Concordia University in Montreal and the author of “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.”
“Writing about word processing when that’s how you write is like trying to write about your own hand,” Mr. Wershler said. “It’s easier to talk about how things used to work than how they work now.”
Mr. Kirschenbaum, whose earlier book, “Mechanisms,” analyzed experimental electronic writing, said he was less interested in analyzing the stylistic impact of word processing than in recovering its early history, particularly its adoption by mainstream writers. And in his lecture, sponsored by NYPL Labs, a unit of the library devoted to experimental technology, he ticked off some of the better-documented moments in that history. Tom Clancy wrote his 1984 thriller “The Hunt for Red October,” often cited as one of the earliest word-processed best sellers, on an Apple IIe, using WordStar software. And Jimmy Carter set off what may have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir in progress by hitting the wrong keys on his brand-new $12,000 Lanier, a calamity noted in The New York Times.
Given the spottiness of the record Mr. Kirschenbaum is hesitant to proclaim Mr. King the computer-age equivalent of Mark Twain, the first major American writer to complete a work using the new technology. But Mr. King’s 1983 short story “The Word Processor,” Mr. Kirschenbaum ventured, is “likely the earliest fictional treatment of word processing by a prominent English-language author.”
The story, published in Playboy (later retitled “Word Processor of the Gods”), certainly captured the unsettling ghostliness of the new technology, which allowed writers to correct themselves without leaving even the faintest trace. In the story a frustrated schoolteacher discovers that by erasing sentences about his enemies he can delete them entirely from the universe and insert himself in their place, a reflection of Mr. King’s fascination with his Wang System 5’s “insert,” ”delete” and “execute” keys, recounted in the introduction to his 1985 story collection, “Skeleton Crew.” “Writers are used to playing God, but suddenly now the metaphor was literal,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in the lecture.
On a more mundane level Mr. Kirschenbaum has received permission to use the corporate archive at Microsoft, where he hopes to trace the marketing rhetoric that helped create a near-mystical aura around a product designed primarily for the ordinary world of the office. (“More than words,” promised one early slogan for Microsoft Word.) He also wants to pinpoint the beginnings of features now taken for granted, like spell-checking and track changes, not to mention the rise and fall of Clippy, the demonically cheerful animated paper-clip “helper” hatched by Microsoft in 1997 and subsequently killed off in numerous gleeful parodies.
The literary world is full of analog holdouts clinging to their Olympias. But word processing may be less amenable to the kind of fetishism surrounding older writing tools.
“People treasure old, weird typewriters,” Mr. Wershler said. “But you throw out a computer, and it’s gone. It’s sitting in a pile of toxic rubble in India.”
Mr. King’s first computer — a boxy behemoth with a beige molded casing, built-in monochrome screen, and $11,500 price tag — has enjoyed a certain cultish afterlife. “I am in negotiations to buy Stephen King’s Wang,” a dealer of antiquarian computers announces in William Gibson’s 2003 cyberpunk classic “Pattern Recognition.”
Collectors searching for the real thing, however, are out of luck. The machine went to California in the late 1990s for data retrieval and never made it back, Mr. Kirschenbaum was dismayed to learn from Mr. King’s assistant a few years ago.
Still, Mr. Kirschenbaum said he hopes to acquire a similar specimen before his project is finished.
“There’s a lot of affection for that computer,” he said. “It’s rare to even see them for sale.”
http://www.archive.org/details/2011-12-stephen-kings-wang
Mark Twain famously prepared the manuscript for Life on the Mississippi with his new Remington typewriter, and today we recognize that typewriting changed the material culture (and the economy) of authorship. But when did literary writers begin using word processors? Who were the early adopters? How did the technology change their relation to their craft? Was the computer just a better typewriter, or was it something more? This talk, drawn from the speaker’s forthcoming book on the subject, will provide some answers, and also address questions related to the challenges of conducting research at the intersection of literary and technological history.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.
http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/history-of-word-processing-your-assitance-needed/
Greetings. As described in Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times story “The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute,” I am in the midst of researching and writing a book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book is under contract to Harvard University Press, and should be out in late 2013. You can listen to a talk I recently gave at the New York Public Library based on the first chapter, “Stephen King’s Wang,” here.
The book documents the moment at which large numbers of literary writers began making the transition from typewriters to word processors and personal computers (late 1970s, early 1980s). I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:
authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute;
anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).
If you would like to offer information, anecdotes, corrections, or tips about things to look at or persons to contact, please write to me at mkirschenbaum at gmail dot com. Thank you for reading.