Writing Machines, written by N. Katherine Hayles, and designed by Anne Burdick, is the latest in the Mediawork Pamphlet series. Writing Machines has already been hailed for its exploration of how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.
The Supplement includes an interactive lexicon linkmap, index, bibliography, notes, and errata, and offers alternative mappings of the book’s conceptual terrain with functionalities unavailable in print. Completing the cycle of remediation, the Supplement gives the user the ability to customize his or her own copy of the book by providing Adobe Acrobat .pdf files for each section, some of which are formatted in “printer’s spreads” that can be printed out, folded, and inserted into the body of the book itself. The site also includes information on ordering the book and a comprehensive interview with the author and designer.