Month: October 2005

Matthew Kirschenbaum is looking for poets and fiction writers willing to participate in a project to archive versions of texts in progress. An electronic document repository (known as a Concurrent Versions System, or CVS) will be used to track revisions and changes to original fiction and poetry contributed by participating writers who will work by checking their drafts in and out of the repository system. The goal is to provide access to a work at each and every state of its composition and conceptual evolution ­- thereby capturing the text as a living, dynamic object-in-the-making rather than a finished end-product. A reader will be able to watch the composition process unfold as though s/he were looking over the writer’s shoulder.

Participating writers must agree to:

* Work with your text exclusively within the confines of the CVS, checking it in and out each and every time you wish to edit or compose.

* Give their consent to make all archived versions of the work publicly accessible.

The result will be a Web-accessible archive, with the full text of each and every version of a writer’s text available for reading and relations between the versions expressed by means of maps and visualizations.

To participate, please contact Kirschenbaum at mgk =at= umd =dot= edu . Please indicate your willingness to abide by the above constraints.

Matthew Kirschenbaum
Assistant Professor of English
Acting Associate Director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
301-405-8927 or 301-314-7111 (fax)

Home

http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/

[Note: At this point Kirschenbaum is recruiting interested writers. He is not sure when the project will actually get off the ground – hopefully this winter.]