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The .txtual Condition 3 53 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in april 2011, scholars were buzzing with the news of Ken Price’s discovery of thousands of new papers written in Walt Whitman ’s own hand at the National Archives of the United States. Price, a distinguished University of Nebraska literature professor and founding coeditor of the digital Walt Whitman Archive, had followed a hunch and gone to the Archives II campus in College Park looking for federal government documents—red tape, essentially —that might have been produced by the Good Gray Poet during Whitman’s tenure in Washington, D.C., as one of those much-maligned federal bureaucrats during the tumultuous years 1863–73. Price’s instincts were correct: he has to date located and identified some three thousand official documents penned by Whitman and believes there are still more to come. One point to make in passing is that the boundaries between digital and analog scholarship have already been warped beyond recognition, with the texts destined to be digitized and added to the online collections at the Whitman site—is this a harbinger of comparative textual media, then, or is it merely what good scholarship looks like in the twenty-first century? Yet the documents have value not just or perhaps not even primarily prima facie. Rather, collectively, they constitute what Friedrich Kittler once called a discourse network, a way of aligning or rectifying (think maps) Whitman’s activities in other domains through correlation with the carefully dated entries in the official records. “We can now pinpoint to the exact day when he was thinking about certain issues,” Price is quoted as saying in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Howard 2011a). Put another way, the official government documents written in Whitman’s hand are important to us not just as data but as metadata . They are a reminder that the human lifeworld all around us 54 MATTHEW G. KIRSCHENBAUM bears the ineluctable marks and traces of our passing, mundane more often than not, and that these marks and tracings often take the form of written and inscribed documents, some of which survive , some of which do not, some of which are displayed through glass in helium- and water vapor–filled cases, and some of which lie forgotten in archives, or under our beds, or beneath the end papers of other books. Today such documents are as likely to be digital, or more precisely born-digital, as they are physical artifacts. The category of the born-digital, I will argue, is an essential one for comparative textual media. In 1995, in the midst of the first widespread wave of digitization, the Modern Language Association saw fit to issue a “Statement on the Significance of Primary Records” to assert the importance of retaining physical artifacts for evidentiary purposes even after they have been microfilmed or scanned for general access.“A primary record,” the MLA told us, “can appropriately be defined as a physical object produced or used at the particular past time that one is concerned with in a given instance” (27). The situation in which we find ourselves today is one, simply put, where the conceit of a “primary record” can no longer be assumed to be coterminous with that of a“physical object.” Electronic texts, files, feeds, and transmissions of all sorts are also now, indisputably, primary records (for proof, one need look no further than recent Twitter hashtags such as #Egypt or #Japan). In the arena of literature and literary studies, a writer working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past because the basic material evidence of their authorial activity—manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals—is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. Indeed, as I was finishing revisions to this essay, the British...

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