Digital Archiving Resources

Literary Machines: Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive

Title

Literary Machines: Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive

Subject

Digital humanities

Description

In his foundational new media text, Nelson describes literature itself as a series of interconnecting documents, and suggests that society needs a universal system for storing and preserving texts. Though he writes in the early 1980s, Nelson's proposal pinpoints many of the facets that today are defining features of the digital archive: the user's ability to search for and recall the correct text; evolving storage structures; and linked elements such as placemarkers, footnotes, and hypertextual jumps. Nelson's system, like a digital archive, would be open to the public, but the option would also exist for personal, private archiving.

Creator

Nelson, Theodor H.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah
Montfort, Nick

Publisher

The MIT Press

Date

2003

Contributor

Sara Raffel

Type

Book

Identifier

ISBN-13: 978-0262232272

Bibliographic Citation

Nelson, Theodor H. "Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive." 

Files

Screenshot 2015-12-01 22.49.04.png

Collection

Citation

Nelson, Theodor H. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah Montfort, Nick, “Literary Machines: Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive,” Digital Archiving Resources, accessed March 28, 2024, https://dar.cah.ucf.edu/items/show/263.