Dealing with Digital Literary Materials

Matthew Kirschenbaum, who mused about Shakespeare’s hard drive a couple years ago, led an NEH-funded digital humanities project that explored the complexities of curating digital literary materials. The project’s report, Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use, highlights a range of familiar issues: from “it is difficult even to achieve consensus on the proper object of preservation” (21) to “the need for basic (cyber)infrastructure in the area of born-digital collections” (24).