Matthew Kirschenbaum

This is just what higher education looks like in a failed state.

We need an infrastructure for retrieving material trapped on outdated computers.

Academic study of new media is increasingly spawning more specialized inquiry: Game studies, software studies, critical-code studies, even platform studies are all buzzwords in the field. One high-profile meeting last year at the University of California at San Diego, hosted by Lev Manovich and…

Why humanities students should learn to program The first program most people learn to write in any computer language is called Hello World. Its sole function is to display those two words on the screen. But the act of writing and then running Hello World can raise some intriguing questions: Who,…

There is no doubt that it is time for a serious conversation about reading, not least because books themselves are changing. Google, in cooperation with several dozen research libraries worldwide, is digitizing books at the rate of 3,000 a day. The noncommercial Open Content Alliance is scanning at…

We may never know if Shakespeare had a sister, but we can be certain he didn’t have a hard drive. What if he had? Details of his writing process and his life currently a mystery might be pitilessly exposed. As scholars will tell you, there are no manuscripts of the plays surviving in the Bard’s own…