UMD SCHOLAR TRACKS HOW WORD PROCESSORS CHANGED WRITING BY CHRIS CARROLL
THE CROWN JEWEL OF MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM’S COLLECTION, OR MAYBE JUST THE MOST HULKING PIECE OF IT, OCCUPIES A CORNER IN THE BASEMENT OF HORNBAKE LIBRARY. IT’S A FEW HUNDRED POUNDS OF BEIGE COLD WAR-ERA MACHINERY, WITH CRYPTIC BUTTONS AND KNOBS AND A VAGUELY MENACING AIR, LIKE SOMETHING FOR DIALING IN BALLISTIC MISSILE TARGET COORDINATES. the first dedicated device ever marketed for a thenrevolutionary activity called “word processing,” ibm’s Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter, or mt/st, wasn’t designed for mass destruction. Instead, its arrival in 1964—meeting with the kind of fanfare reserved today for new iPhones—would transform the landscape for writers around the world. In Kirschenbaum’s recent book, “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,” the associate professor of English and director of umd’s graduate certificate in digital studies uncovers how the mt/st and its successors captured—and even changed— the imagination of authors, upended modern offices, tweaked stereotypical gender roles and digitally altered the fundamentals of writing.
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“Writing by hand or sitting at a typewriter, we’re always in the present moment, going character by character, line by line,” he says. “Word processing allowed writers to grasp a manuscript as a whole, a gestalt. Everything was instantly available via search functions. Whole passages could be moved at will, and chapters or sections reordered. The textual field became fluid and malleable.” These new powers depended on the machines— from Osbornes to Brothers to Apples—many of which Kirschenbaum has up and running in the Hornbake Library office of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. “It’s not about nostalgia,” he says, but so he and colleagues can access and preserve manuscripts or old interactive fiction written on forgotten operating systems and dead technologies. What not so long ago seemed futuristic was in danger of being lost to history, so Kirschenbaum set out to document it.