Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

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Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is an 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 Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature and creative new media (including games), textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humanities computing at Virginia's Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (where he was the Project Manager of the William Blake Archive). His dissertation was the first electronic dissertation in the English department at Virginia and one of the very first in the nation.

Kirschenbaum's first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008. (Taking its cues from textual studies and recent critical interest in writing and inscription technologies, Mechanisms addresses itself to the material and historical particulars of landmark works of new media and electronic literature, applying computer forensics to conduct new kinds of media-specific readings and drawing on significant new archival sources for works like Michael Joyce's Afternoon and William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa.") He is a principal investigator for MONK, a multi-institutional Mellon-funded project to develop advanced analytical and visualization tools for digital text collections. He is also a co-investigator on an NDIIPP-funded project devoted to Preserving Virtual Worlds. With Amit Kumar, he developed the Virtual Lightbox, an online tool for image comparison. He is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, including Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, and MediaCommons.

Kirschenbaum's current research interests in new media include serious games and simulations, digital preservation, writing technologies and the conditions of contemporary authorship, text visualization, social software, and cyberinfrastructure. His most recent graduate seminar (spring 2006) was Inscribing Media. He is currently directing or co-directing five dissertations. He blogs at both MGK and Zone of Influence (the latter mainly about games).

He is married to Kari Kraus. His other interests include military history and boardgames. He lives in College Park, Maryland.

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