"Every Contact Leaves a Trace"

I’m speaking at the History of Material Texts seminar at the University of Pennsylvania next week (Monday, April 4, at 5:15 in the Penn Humanities Forum). Here’s the abstract for my talk, based on material from my book:

Every Contact Leaves a Trace: Computers Forensics and Electronic Textuality

“Every contact leaves a trace” was the dictum propagated by Edmond Locard, police inspector of Lyons and pioneer of modern forensic science. This talk will explore what the emerging field of computer forensics—most recently in the news with the capture of the confessed “BTK killer” using evidence obtained from a floppy disk—has to tell us about electronic textuality, particularly the now well-turned question of the materiality of electronic documents.

Legally a computer file is a form of physical evidence. I will suggest that the nature of forensic evidence and the field’s applied techniques ask us to reconsider many chestnuts about electronic writing—its presumed ephemerality, for example, or the postmodern concept of the simulacrum—copies without originals. The talk will illustrate the concept of “forensic readings” of electronic literature, while also drawing parallels to more traditional forms of bibliography and textual criticism—considering what these venerable fields, the most sophisticated branches of media studies I know, have to offer the digital word.