Digital Archives, Digital Cultures: An Opportunity for German Studies

Digital Archives, Digital Cultures:An Opportunity for German Studies Thorsten Ries (bio) "die geräte klüger als ihre besitzer / rechnen sich bis zu programnmen und knälen vor." This text fragment was located between other born-digital drafts in a digital [End Page 136] document file, which the author preserved in his personal born-digital archive. In this draft of the poem ausfahrt st nazaire, which was partially inspired by 9/11, Speier also experimented with concepts of concrete poetry and this draft's digital materiality: he integrated automatically generated HTML and CSS code into his poetic draft and rewrote the code into verse. "the devices smarter than their owners / "—Speier's tentative code scriptum continues the long negotiation and renegotiation of poetic agency between the writer and their tool, writing scene, and its context that scholars have followed through Klopstock's Arbeitstagebuch,1 Hölderlin's manuscripts, Nietzsche's typescripts ("unser schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren gedanken"),2 and which is continued in the unease some authors feel about the limitations of their graphical writing interfaces,3 as well as in the form of digital literature, digitally generated literature ("Schreibenlassen"), and code poetry.4 Research on personal born-digital archives, preserved according to forensic standards, could be described as a continuation of the philological program, analytic bibliography, scholarly editing, and the critique génétique with digital forensic means in the digital age: the recovery of born-digital drafts, draft fragments, corrupted data, and other traces of the writing process from hard drives, storage media, and even the cloud, serves the purpose of the philological reconstruction of the literary writing process. Although media-specific analysis of historical digital materiality is highly specific, the reconstruction of traces of the writing process from Michael Speier's, Thomas Kling's,5 and other authors' hard drives6 at the same time sheds light on the authors' hybrid writing practices between analogue and digital, as well as on a new type of material digital record: paragenetic traces of the word processor.7 Depending on the specific historical design of the system's ensemble of hardware, operating system, and application, crashes of the word processor system can actually lead to retention and preservation of draft text material. Literary production has changed its shape in the digital age, and recent studies on the hybrid materiality of some of the earliest born-digital literary and cultural code works, such as Lutz's Stochastische Texte, and Weizenbaum's ELIZA,8 demonstrate that literary archives are collecting and preserving born-digitals as well as digital literature beyond hypertext. Without stepping into complications associated with the term "media archaeology," one could draw a line from Friedrich Kittler's reading of hard- and software architectures as a technological document of historical dispositives and cultural technological history9 to Jean-Francois Blanchette's multilayered design histories of hard- and software architectures10 and to Matthew Kirschenbaum's "forensic materiality" of digital media.11 The digital forensic perspective on born-digital has not only an archival and literary dimension for German studies and its integration with Digital Humanities research methods and methodology. Under a digital culture perspective, the German USENET [End Page 137] and early web history still require scholarly investigation as cultural spaces and its preservation is materially precarious. First attempts have been made to tackle conceptual and practical issues of the preservation of German "diskmag" culture.12 But if we consider taking digital German culture studies seriously as part of German studies, we might have to include the Chaos Computer Club's Hackerbibel, the texts and code by the German feminist hackers around Rena Tangens (codename Haecksen), and nerd pop culture products like the German Perry Rhodan sci-fi series in our canon, next to Elfriede Jelinek's Ich Ding der Unmöglichkeit and Sibylle Berg's Nerds retten die Welt. A digital forensic perspective would also be applied, under a broader digital history and digital cultures perspective, in research projects on German polarized political discourse and misinformation in online and social media networks. Thorsten Ries thorsten ries (thorsten.ries@austin.utexas.edu) an assistant professor at the Department of Germanic...