These are some speculations for my third chapter, which I'm going to begin researching this spring. Whereas the first two chapters were about text analysis and text encoding, this chapter will be about media. I'm looking to explore how an attention to the material specificity of media enhances our reading of eletronic literary work, such as hypertext and interactive fiction.

The theoretical focus on this paper will engage New Materialisms and Black Feminist studies. Here, I'll be drawing from my class last semester with Amber Musser, where we read so many fascinating accounts about materiality being lively, animated, vital, and about humanity being imbricated with it. I'm thinking of authors like Jayna Brown and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, who work with (or work around) traditionally white male dominated discourses about materiality and liberal humanism to offer black female lineages of this kind of thinking. I'm also interested in Musser's work, whose discussion of sensuality and fleshiness will be key for my reading of media.

The technological focus of this paper will be on early computer equipment. The reason that I'm interested in older versus newer computers is I'm interested in what Katherine N. Hayles calls "distributed cognitive environments," that is, the perceptual engagement between user and computer. I think it will be easier to study this from a historical remove, and I am also interested in the continuous updating of technologies which forces data to shift from one structure to another.

Here, I am heavily indebted to Matt Kirschenbaum's work in his book Mechanisms (2008), his "media archeological" method of examining the material specificities of what is commmonly thought of "immaterial" computing processes. I'm thinking particularly of his chapter on hard drives. My plan is to visit a few archives (ideally the Maryland Institute of Technology, where Kirschenbaum is based, the Media Archeology Lab in Boulder, and the Computer History Museum in California) to look at old hardware and software.

Last step is to find a literary text for all of this. I've been writing about hypertext fiction (and obsolesence of Flash software) which is one option. Probably will stick with this.