Abstract
The digital era has become inundated with the idea of anonymity as on the
Internet where users create avatars in forums and write without obvious material
constraint; however when considering documents such as graphic novels and print
fiction, the figure of the author remains a nostalgic figure which grants
validity to the document. In classic comic book collections such as Watchmen and
Batman: Year One by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, the original scripts by the
authors are included in special editions in both print and Kindle format. But
these “original” script pages are shrouded in forms of
anonymity as they illustrate signs of digitization, either through scanning or
during production and thus display various visual clues, such as errors, which
relay levels of realness. Furthermore online versions of these script pages,
found on fan website databases and authors’ blogs, are complicated by the
anonymity the Internet and digital editions produce. Therefore a digital
forensics methodology is used to interrogate these script pages in both print
and digital format to create an ordering system for digitally manipulated text.
It also endeavours to illustrate the possibilities for a forming digital
forensics field by using various technical calculations and recreations of text
with original software and hardware.
Section 1: Introduction
Online versions of text, whether accessed through Kindle files, downloadable pdfs
or blog postings, illustrate the changing modality of humanities research that
enables new parameters for examination and discussion of non-traditional
material. Scholars have begun to study digitized classical texts and images,
such as scans of William Blake’s artwork and Shakespeare’s folios; however,
there exists a gap in discourse: comic books/graphic novels. Though
Internet-moderated collections of digital comics have existed for years, the
availability of and discussions about the value and production process of
digital comics are substantially more accessible with the recent growth of the
Internet [
Norcliffe and Rendace 2003]. Digitally produced and circulated
graphic novels and their accompanying secondary texts present new challenges for
analysis, particularly regarding the formation of approaches to digital media
and its popularization in mainstream culture and academia. Digital forensics is
an approach that investigates the ways in which digital data is stored and
transmitted on devices and traditionally utilized by “business, industry, government and
military”
[
Palmer 2002], yet is also emerging within the arts as a productive means of inquiry.
Associated actions include retracing keyboard strokes, recovering data and
passwords through decryption, and creating and comparing files in order to
understand how data and its encasing were constructed [
Palmer 2002]. Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) considers this in
Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, stating that
digital forensics is “commemorative as well as judicial, and fundamental to the arts as well as
the sciences ” [
Kirschenbaum 2008]. Employing the
digital forensics methodology to the arts requires a flexible subject; various
versions of graphic novels that have either been digitally reproduced or
formatted within a digital file provide an example of such “crystallizing at the nexus of storage,
inscription and instrumentation”. In this study, [
Kirschenbaum 2008] uses the example of floppy disks that contain
video games, and the magnetic engraving upon them, to practice a type of digital
forensics, allocating attention to the physical qualities of the magnetic ribbon
and retrieving electronic data from discontinuities on the ribbon’s surface.
This article illustrates a modified digital forensics methodology, utilizing both
original print and digital graphic novel texts as case studies to analyse
digital/print authorship and the associated Internet network through the
appendices, with primary focus on digitally reprinted typewritten scripts by
graphic novel authors Frank Miller (Batman Year
One; Daredevil) and Alan Moore (Watchmen; The Killing
Joke; From Hell), as well as unofficial
digital versions disseminated on the Internet. The digital forensics methodology
employed includes reproducing texts manually, statistically calculating
characteristics and using scholarship from multiple fields to understand the
ways in which digital texts imitate original sources. While section two
contextualizes the connections between print and capitalism, section three
examines the probability of scanning marks and page alignment in Miller’s Batman: Year One by comparing similar documents and
calculating letters’ pixel ratios. The fourth section offers a contrasting view
of digital comic scripts that derive from word processing programs and, as such,
requires different parameters such as encryption and stylistic blocking for
validation. Fake comic books scripts are introduced in section five, examining
their presence in Moore’s Watchmen where conscious
choices to include misalignment and typing errors illustrate the ordering
systems used by authors and publishers to recreate authenticity. In this
section, the digital forensic method includes recreating the actual script on a
typewriter and calculating probability of errors. Section six uses the
methodology to interrogate blog postings of Moore’s scripts and questions the
blocking as well as capitalization of words. It also considers the user comments
and whether the Internet breeds or credits authenticity.
Conflicts surrounding legitimacy and anonymity of digitally manipulated scripts
propagate through these texts by levels of realness presented to the reader by
ordering systems, such as errors. The term “realness”
represents the perceived value of authenticity by the user, i.e. whether
something is believable as existing in present reality according to the reader.
This evaluation of competency and credibility is one of the requirements of a
digital forensics analysis [
Palmer 2002]. This article attempts to
articulate modern conceptions of digital reading as well as digital writing
through the interrogation of the ordering system regulations that appear and
their associated credibility. The discourse network which is produced and
substantiated by these digitized graphic novels involves complex connections
between capitalism, visualizations, technology, anonymity, authorship and
nostalgia; I believe that what an analysis of this network or archive reveals is
how the conditions surrounding a digital text, not the text itself, produce our
ability to access and frame such a discourse network, as well as the figure of
the author in the digital era.
Section 2: Scripts and Selling Points
Within the past few decades various comic book authors have achieved celebrity
status and characters have been integrated into North American mythology,
witnessed by the popularity of movies such as
The Dark
Knight and
The Avengers as well as
events such as Comic Con. Converted consumers who were not previously exposed to
comics as well as lifelong avid fans are expressing interest in the creative
process and the figure of the author, driving multitudes of publishers to
include original scripts, drawings, and notes within digitally reproduced
reissues and collective volumes. These additional scripts and notes constitute
the paratext, e.g. that which surrounds the main body of text; traditional
examples of the paratext include appendices, publishing marks, covers, and
footnotes. Within academics and publishing, Joseph Bensman (1988) argues that
“footnotes have important
institutional, ‘political,’ and aesthetic functions”
[
Bensman 1988]. Appendices and paratextual elements, specifically
typewritten comic book scripts, also occupy this space within the graphic
novel’s statements. The aesthetic and institutional effect of the graphic
novel’s paratext has been used as a source of profit by companies who increase
the price of special reissued editions because of it.
The celebrity status of authors and inclusion of the new paratext reflects the
fetishization of these scripts and the increasing aesthetics currency value.
Typewriters are similarly fetishized [
Kittler 1999], connoting
nostalgic images of previous eras and linking text with monetary value.
Nostalgia, which is the rubbing of past and present [
Hutcheon 1998], lies in the discourse network around the typewriter that recalls specific
political, cultural and domestic memories. Famous author’s typewriters and the
associated works have been sold for higher market price as collector’s items as
seen on websites such as Etsy and Ebay. Further typewriter models and authors
are fetishized by the innumerable copies of images on websites and secondary
publishing, becoming almost pornographic as they are worshipped by fans and
objectified [
Wershler-Henry 2005]. Secondary objects emerge, such
as typewriter bedspreads and fridge magnets which are sold by in vogue companies
such as Urban Outfitters, but the images are all licenced through the original
publishers and estates. Thus a large commercial network is formed around the
print text and is paralleled by the economy of comic books. Alteration and
commercialism both contribute to the objectification of the comic book authors
and their associated texts; therefore, this article focuses on providing both a
contextual and mechanical reading of the digitized scripts.
Beyond social implications, the creation process of modern comics allows a
secondary layer of analysis, as comic books are now produced on digital
interfaces. Digital production of comic books with current text and image
processing software programs, such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign,
alters the discursive statements of a text, evidenced through the shifts of the
paratextual digitized additions like script pages. Digital editions of comic
books, such as Kindle versions, include hyperlink connections to publisher’s
websites connecting readers to the origin and to the Internet where they can
interact with other users through the comments section. These new paratextual
features are presented as novel entities that increase the entertainment value
of comic books and alter the discourse network. Further, the paratext is what
enables the companies to market nostalgia as the modern world (i.e. the Internet
forums) is contrasted against the old world represented by the typewritten
scripts.
Section 3: Scanning and Batman: Year One
When DC Comics decided to revitalize its superheroes in the mid 1980s, writer
Frank Miller and illustrator David Mazzucchelli created
Batman: Year One, a graphic novel retelling Batman’s origins [
Reichstein 1998]. Because of its impact and popularity, a reissue
released in 2005 included additional paratext in the form of a new foreword,
afterword and never-before-seen original script pages, which the jacket cover
describes as providing “a glimpse
into the making of this contemporary classic”
[
Miller 2005]. These additional paratexts are marketed as a
selling feature on DC’s website where the graphic novel is listed as one of the
best sellers under the fan favourites section heading (Fan Favourites DC). In
Gerard Genette’s (1997) definition of the paratext, it serves to reveal or
provide information for the reader, both through immediate text such as jacket
covers and through text later formulated, such as a critical reading. The
graphic novels’ paratext sets not only the context for the content in the
foreword, but produces narratives that function externally to the main text, a
modern parallel to hypertextuality seen in the afterword and typewritten
scripts. Furthermore these scripts convey the relationship between romantic
authority of the pre-contemporary typewriter, essential in the modern creative
process, and Internet-associated anonymity. Although the realness of the scripts
is contestable, they highlight the fundamental modality of acceptance that
society employs toward printed text as opposed to digital text seen extending
from the historical introduction of the printed bank notes, creating a “currency of ‘trust’”
[
Robertson 2013].
In the new, digitally reproduced afterword, four smaller script pages are printed
and are seen in Figure 1.
These scripts are not clean copies; the pages are covered in
scribbles, markings, coffee stains, pencil and pen. Red ink underlines the
caption titles, drawing attention away from the main body of text on the page
and placing it on the coloured lines. The captions correspond to a numbering
system written in pencil, which correlates with panels displayed directly on the
opposite page. Seminal comic book houses DC and Marvel use InDesign as the
software program for page layout and publishing [
Marvel Internship Opportunities 2013],
indicating the editorial gesture to display matching script and image; this
highlights the imposition of the digital on the technical reproduction. The
software and print machines designate the connection between page and image as
well as the sizing and quality of the two visualizations as InDesign allows the
user to set the pixel density and colouring settings [
Adobe 2014].
The tension between the print and digital implicates different levels of the
discursive network due to the temporal differences, e.g. the Xs occurred during
typing, whereas the scribbles were marked after the script had been passed
between collaborators and scanning occurred later. The digital reproduction
conflates these experiences or, rather, does not leave obvious traces of
multiple collaborations. Furthermore, in comparing digital text to
1980s-reproduced texts, Frances Robertson notes that “these typed-up looking pages act to
denote the sincerity and honest labour of the writer.”
#roberston2013
Craig Dworkin comments on the use of symbols such as dashes and
ellipses, where the “symbols must be viewed;
they cannot be spoken without some contrived act of translation.” [
Dworkin 1999, 62]
Here the scribbles, underlines, and X’d out letters similarly cannot be spoken
without the reader consciously integrating their own proclivities into
translations, and thus reiterations for different readers are found in the
prosody of the text. The ephemeral quality of the script then is configured into
this construction and furthered as not every panel matches the caption
perfectly. These interventions associated with InDesign contribute to anonymity
of authorship and act as a product of the collaborative nature of comic books,
eroding the notion of the singular author figure and contributing to the
multiplicity of the network that is emblematic of contemporary Internet user
interactions.
This dialectic between author as romantic notion and author as
multiple/anonymous, which is a product of the digital experience, continues
throughout the examples, illustrating tensions underneath consumption and
creation of digital textual products. An opposing example is witnessed in Frank
Miller’s
Daredevil: Volume 1 which portrays a
realistic typewritten script that is entirely digitally created. Seen in Figure
2, graphic artists have used programs such as Photoshop to create residue scan
marks in the corners and mimicked typewriter typeface.
However, several indicators such as sizing, borders and text uniformity
ultimately reveal the text to originate from a digital source. Several of these
issues are displayed in the text of Miller’s
Batman: Year
One scripts. Figure 3 illustrates an example of where errors and
text uniformity reveal the realness of a text and the extent to which it has
been digitally manipulated.
In choosing to display marked-up text, the pages subsequently conceal as much as
they reveal. Typewritten overlays exert authority of authorship while also
succumbing to it. The gesture of the typewriter is that it forces the writer to
think before typing in order to avoid errors [
Flusser 2009]. The
Xs and ink scratches in Figure 3 are effects of the gesture of typewriting, and
thus produce the ephemerality of these drafts presented to the consumer.
Conversely, word processors allow the user to edit as they write, conflating the
experience between writing and editing, erasing the totality of the author. The
typewriter’s editing process is complicated by the fact that these pages are
digitally reproduced. The implication of the text’s digital and physical
qualities is exemplary of the tensions between consumption and creation,
illustrated by the scanning/photocopying process. Evidence of scanning is
exhibited in the black borders on the top and bottom of the four quadrants of
script grids in Figure 1, which are consistently parallel with the borders of
the novel, yet the borders of the actual scanned pages overlap at inconsistent
angles. Questioning the mistakes, such as border alignment and errors, produces
ambiguity surrounding the validity of these digitally recreated documents and
the author. If these documents were key to the novel’s commercial success,
normal assumptions would be that DC Comics would have ensured these documents
were scanned properly or at least Photoshopped straight. The misalignment is a
reflection of how typewritten documents assert authority and authorship in a
digital era; it becomes important that these pages are misaligned to show the
traces of the digital process in order for the readers to ascribe these pages
with a value of realness and relinquish the anonymity of the collaborative
author.
Within the alternate script pages, closer scrutiny reveals a difference of
typeface between individual pages, characterized by the consistency of the
letterings’ width as well as the shade of the page seen in Figure 4.
Typeface one uses heavy ink and follows the shape of stereotypical typewriter
script while the second category of typeface has less consistency of boldness
and elongated letters more similar to electronic typewriters or word processing
output; however the scripts appear together as if they were composed at the same
time in random order. Technical instructions with words “medium” and
“close” are examples of phrases that appear within the two types of
scripts and illustrate key differences between them. The ratio of height to
width for the word “medium” in the former typeface is 6.57±.001: 1 pixels,
while for the secondary typeface is 7.83±.001: 1 pixels. Therefore by analysing
the specific heights and boldness, there is a definitive difference between the
script pages that results in part from digital manipulation. In the case of
questioned typewritten documents, professional forensics experts used ink bleeds
and letter boldness to determine the veracity of a text [
Lacy 1946]. In this instance examining the scanning process as well as the writing
process illustrates the digital forensics methodology, whereby questioning the
composition and reception paratextuality reveals how digital modification alters
textuality through nostalgia and commercialism regarding modern typewritten
scripts.
Section 4: Microsoft Word Documents and The Killing
Joke
The paradox involving nostalgia, authorship and commercialization is challenged
by online script leaks where whole communities of fans have, through various
means, obtained versions of the scripts and posted them to websites. One of
these websites,
The Comic Book Script Archive, has
a copy of the first twelve pages of Alan Moore’s
The
Killing Jokeas a 2007 Microsoft Word document, seen in Figure 5.
The lengthy descriptions, direction of panel size and placement and overall style
is reflective of a real Alan Moore script [
Ellis 2000b]. But it is
contained as a Microsoft Word document that anyone could have created, and thus
anonymity abounds.
The conflict between anonymity and authorship provides a complex relationship to
capitalism and ownership. On websites such as DC’s Kindle site, the main source
of sales is the special edition text, while on sites such as The Comic Book Script Archive, ad space and donations
constitute the site’s income. In this case the script is perhaps more authentic
since it is not objectified for monetary value; however, it embodies another
type of value, ownership. The procurer retains so-called bragging rights and is
able to claim ownership over the document. Therefore this network belongs to a
different set of motivations and statements that centre on currency involving
ingenuity, ownership and resourcefulness as well as publishing and authenticity.
Other forms of scripts include faxed documents, blog postings on author websites
and actual documents emailed by the authors themselves. The community around the
scripts acts as a secondary paratext to the documents, which in turn are also
paratextual. The Internet versions from the archive are removed from the primary
discourse network as they have endured other forms of translation and
modification as well as existing without the same value expectations.
These expectations alter the approach of a digital forensics methodology,
shifting focus on ownership rather than commercial value. In the Microsoft Word
document of The Killing Joke, Moore’s name appears
within the first line, but when examining the document’s properties the owner is
Tim Simmons who is the website moderator (2012). This immediately alerts the
reader that this document has either been modified on Simmons’ computer or it
has been entirely created by him and the romantic notion of authorship is
disrupted by the digital precepts. Furthermore the document is not locked and
therefore it is possible for any user to modify the document.
Within this document are grammatical and structural errors, which Microsoft Word
highlights, but the reason why the author did not fix these mistakes appears as
two choices: that the original script contained these errors, or that the
transcribing author made these errors. Errors enter the discourse surrounding
authorship, but unlike the scan marks they blur as well as clarify the rules and
signification around the author figure. The ambiguity surrounding these errors
recalls the ambiguity within transmission of text online as demonstrated by Alan
Liu. [
Liu 2004] discusses the process by which the separation
between the first user (writer) and second user (reader) results in the
ambiguity of intentions. Although he refers to the structure of a poem and the
directions that need to be issued as to how to reconstruct it after digital
transmission (email), his argument about the need for structure and rules is
applicable in the case of errors. In print, errors and marks act as ordering
structures which delegate specific sets of texts to specific genres and formats
to authors, but in the digital culture they create an enigma of anonymity. The
properties of
The Killing Joke document reinforce
this type of anonymity and speculation over truthfulness. Within the digital
realm errors aren’t enough to confirm authorship; it is encryption, the website
authority and the document ownership which provide a more complete understanding
of authorship.
Section 5: Photoshop and Watchmen
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’
Watchmen, originally
published in 1986, presents the reader with several types of typewritten and
published text. The narrative of the story is told in three modes: one being the
journal of Rorschach, the text of a pirate comic, and the third through a
narrator presenting excerpts from a superhero’s autobiography as well as
informational pamphlets and medical records. The autobiography is of Hollis
Mason, one of the original superheroes within this fictional representation of
America in the 1980s, and has been reprinted for the reader with conscious
awareness of the circumstances. Although the reprint is not in traditional
typewriter Courier font, indicating word processing, there are notes that have
been attached to the top of each page in typewritten script seen in Figure 6.
In an example of an excerpt from the fictional autobiography, the note reads:
“presented here are the excerpts
from UNDER THE HOOD. In this next chapter Hollis Mason discusses...
reprinted with permission of the author ”
[
Moore 2005, 23]. The note supports the romantic notion of
print authorship from the logic that in order to reprint permission is needed of
a singular person. But overall authorship belongs to the creators of the graphic
novel, who in turn created both the note and the autobiography. Therefore the
digital confuses notions of authorship as it allows creators the ability to
overlay notes and paperclips in realistic fashions with program such as
Photoshop. Although originally written in 1986 this new version was recoloured
and scanned in 2004, which allowed for the modification of depth ratios present
in the overlay image.
The uniformity of the note’s letters is similar to the uniformity of false text
at the end of Miller’s Daredevil: Volume 1 as the
letters in the notes have no inky bleeds, smudges or even scan marks. The
attempt to present this evidence as truthful to the typewriter is noticeably
exemplified in the slanted alignment of the notes and the sections of text that
are interrupted by physical page boundaries. The projection of authority and
knowledge through the note is supported and subverted simultaneously by the
interruption of these physical constraints. This fractious union is
representative of the implications that stem from recreating typewritten text in
a digital format as the typewritten text searches for constant validation but is
never justified in contextual meanings. It is the form and physicality that
produces its associations with power and authority within the digital.
One of the more realistic portrayals of typewritten text comes at the end of
chapter six, with Rorschach's criminal records, psychiatric evaluations and
letters. Attempts to assert the typewritten page as real come from visual clues
such as coffee stains, stamp marks and errors, seen in Figure 7.
Through the police report and evaluation the subversion of authority and
knowledge is witnessed in misspellings and clerical errors, such as in the
middle of the report with the word “neretheless”
[
Moore 2005]. This mistake illuminates the process of creating a
realistic fake document. In misspelling “neretheless,” there are actually
two errors: the first error is the forgotten “v,” the other the reversal of
the “r” and second “e.” The “v” is on the bottom row of the
QWERTY assemblage, common to typewriters and computers, therefore it is unlikely
that it would have been switched with the “r” two rows above. This
conclusion is supported by the quantitative model purposed by Neil Kay’s (2013)
equations for the typewriter’s probability of conjoined letters. The reversal of
the “e” and “r” appears much more common, as these two are frequently
paired together and are located beside each other on the QWERTY keyboard layout
[
Kay 2013]. This manipulation and romanticised notion of the
typewriter is supported by the existence of other errors throughout this
psychiatric evaluation, which include three main types. The first is the
reversal of letters with examples “scine” (since), and “hte” (the);
improper spacing in “short ly” (shortly) and “hima s” (him as); and
addition/subtraction of letters in “decide” (decided), “eduscation”
(education) and “forced ing” (forcing) [
Moore 2005, 30–31]. Therefore it indicates the salient precept that errors and misalignments
exist in order for a printed text to assert its validity as belonging to
reality. This dictates a template for errors; specific mistakes or glitches
signify a real text of non-digital writing just as certain marks or disruptions
signify a scanned page.
This idea is perpetuated in Alan Moore’s (2008)
The Killing
Joke afterword, where a short narrative tells the story of a man
creating a hypothetical killing of Batman. The status and authority of the
author, as well as the digital, are encoded within it. The man videotapes his
confessions and ideas and thus the words are translated into the realm of the
digital. By portraying an author in a digital context, the idea is subversive in
its stance towards our understanding of the figure of the author as cult status
romantic image. It conflates the time of writing and producing, erasing part of
the gesture of writing as the modern writer “is born simultaneously with his text”
[
Barthes 1977], just as digital word processing conflates writing
and editing. This erasure is not in totality; it indicates a shift in the
notions of the author and the creative process which must now be considered in
the digital era. By using a digital forensics methodology which examines the
spelling errors and small page markings as well as larger contextual instances,
a developing type of research is witnessed. The decentering of research
disallows a simplistic understanding of meaning or authorial intent and instead
focuses on the materiality as well as the ramifications of the text.
Section 6: Internet Websites and From
Hell
[
Jameson 1991] argues that fandom is now beyond the classical
sense and that the height of American consumption is in the “technology of reproduction
itself.” This can be applied to the discourse surrounding
reproduction of scripts and texts on Internet forums and sites that compile
various editions. Through a weekly column published online, graphic novel
author Warren Ellis engages with questions about the industry, the process
of creation and notions of authorship. Ellis cites examples of different
artists’ formatting techniques and styles, including types of word
processing programs and digital inferences. Many styles use a screenplay
type structure with some authors preferring screenplay software, such as
Celtx, while other authors manually format their scripts in Microsoft Word
[
Ellis 2000a]. The implications of different techniques as
well as technology affect the discourse around them, causing social orders
to form around the techniques, such as the famous Marvel method.
On the artist Eddie Campbell’s personal website, his collaboration with Alan
Moore,
From Hell, is posted in various
fragments. Campbell has reproduced Moore’s original script through the
confines of the Internet webpage, raising questions of authorship as Moore
originally wrote the text but Campbell has posted it online thus producing
anonymity about the true author. The popularity of
From
Hell, due in part to the consumer driven culture mediating it,
has spurred this release of scripts, which are transitory moments of
creation and are encoded in the html of the webpage. Inconsistencies fill
the script posted by Campbell; in one panel’s directions “NO dialogue”
contrasts the following panel with “No dialogue”
[
Campbell 2006b]. The inconsistency of capitalization hints
that the script appearing online has been translated between files or
physical mediums. Each panel description is written in all caps, similar to
scripts previously witnessed earlier in this article and illustrated in
Figure 8.
[
Campbell 2007b] discusses this as characteristic of Moore’s
style and cites Dave Gibbons on this technique: “If you type the description in upper case, you
can just put the caps lock on and bash away, without worrying about the
niceties of capitalization at the start of sentences. Having dialogue in
lower case differentiates it from the description, obviously. More
importantly, it means that you can use caps for bold and don't have to
bother going back and underlining. It's a typewriter thing.” By
identifying a typewriter mentality comparative to digital writing, the
digital edition loses authorial power for the reader scrolling through
reproduced scenes. On further posts Campbell [
Campbell 2006a]
has scanned Moore’s photographs which were taken to create real life
references for the collaborators and contain Moore’s handwriting, giving
direction to Campbell. All of these different forms of media assemble on the
website to instruct the reader on the creative process, but the reader’s
interactions will ultimately be varying just as the website changes itself.
It is never revealed to the reader if these are finalized versions,
intermediary versions, or just correspondence between the two collaborators
and the ephemerality of the scripts becomes integrated into the increasing
ephemerality of the digital. There is no definite time mark attributed to
these pieces except for the posting date, nor is there context for how each
post was actually created. For example, did Campbell retype the script on
Microsoft Word and copy and paste it into a WordPress text box, or did he
type it directly into html of the webpage? Changes in the coding between
html and Microsoft Word can alter the text itself and thus the lack of
information about composition subverts the notion of authorship by creating
ambiguity about authenticity and translation.
Also available on the webpage is the ability for users to comment, enabling
the reader to become an active participant in the creation of text. Web page
forums allow users to maintain anonymity while influencing others’
interactions with the primary text. The archive includes these emerging
forms of communication that modify and regulate the discursive object. User
“Mike” comments on Eddie Campbell’s (2007a) original post:
I was
reading through January and saw the photo you posted of your work as
"low-brow art" - this links to a picture of From Hell in the main
Freemason's library in Washington, DC, which incidentally is open to
the public and a magnificent collection.
Feel free to use the pic as you see fit.
Off-topic for this post, I'm afraid, but I use blogspot too, and I
know how hard it is to see comments after they move off the main
page.
This post reconfigures the work and its discursive statements while creating
a link to other media-based networks. Other users respond to this comment
and thus the network grows; however, not all responses relate directly to
this topic and the network behaves as a rhizomatic function. Value is
displaced as “Mike” is possibly a pseudonym and unrepresentative of the
true, real life author and his associated knowledge. There are no academic
associations or a definitive value system for assessing the validity of
Mike’s claims without following the link provided, and nostalgia functions
in a different context than previously witnessed in print forms.
Section 7: Conclusion
The projected desire to witness evidential proof of realness echoes through
these documents and is manifested in part by the anonymity associated with
the digital era, e.g. Internet communities. It functions through nostalgic
relations and associations but ultimately transfigures the relationship
between writer and text through the digital. Errors create not only
organizational patterns but emotional imprints. Sentimentality of errors
galvanizes identification of authors; it makes them human and relatable,
something which is in opposition to the anonymity the Internet offers. By
simplifying discursive rules to sets of errors, authors past appear easier
to access as cult figures than those of the future who manuscripts are
purely digitally composed. Moore now uses Microsoft Word to create his
scripts (2000a), but his process is kept invisible by comic book publishers,
thwarting transparency of authorship. The Internet offers an alternate
possibility for writer-reader interaction by allowing this transparency to
pass at the risk of anonymity.
The errors and marks leave traces just as emails are stored and inscribed
[
Kirschenbaum 2008] and are indicative of the
possibilities that digital forensics produces. What a digital forensics
reading of these images offers is insight into the production process and
the types of implications scanned or recopied typewritten scripts offers. It
also establishes how digital text asserts authority in comparison to printed
work. In both examples it is in the conditions around a text, not the actual
text itself, which mediate our experiences with nostalgia, capitalism and
subjectivity through the digital realm.
Works Cited
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