directory of ETDs currently in progress

Name and Affiliation

Name: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
University: University of Virginia
Department: English

Contact Information

Address:
908 Cottage Lane
Apt. 2
Charlottesville, VA 22903
USA

Phone: (804) 977-9987
Email: mgk3k@virginia.edu

Project Description

Title: Lines for a Virtual T/y/o/pography
Supervisor(s): John Unsworth (director); Jerome McGann
Date Begun: Nov. 1995

Degree: Ph.D.
Format: SGML HTML Network-accessible

Description:

This dissertation, which is being written as a hypertext, explores the visible and visual convergence of information and aesthetics in both print and electronic medias. Topics under discussion include book artists such as Johanna Drucker and Steve McCaffery, the graphic design work of David Carson, multimedia collage, computer and virtual reality interface design, various information mapping technologies, and experiments with machine vision in artificial intelligence research. Aggressively interdisciplinary in its orientation, an important aspect of the dissertation is to develop networks of exchange between the humanities and the sciences.

The project's WWW site (see below) is an experiment in bringing the production of a doctoral thesis out into the open, the network replacing the traditional library or study as my scene of writing. Texts will appear here in rough and unfinished form, and inhabit this space side-by-side with the more polished regions of the dissertation. All is subject to revision, re-placement, removal.

Although presented on-line in HTML, the dissertation will eventually be archived with some other SGML DTD. I have also rejected the CD-ROM format: though this is not the place to delve into the complex issues that are at stake here, I believe the future of scholarly electronic publishing will come to lie not with stand-alone media like the CD-ROM, but rather with network-accessible archives.

URL: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/