Archives of Disappearance

«The majority of the common characters in the major languages of the world are encoded in the 65 000 536 code points, states the Unicode Consortium. But the 16 bit encoding has the capability to encode up to 11 114 112 code points. Long are the quaint days of ASCII’s a 128 code points. Unicode even encodes fictionnal writing systems such as Elvish or Klygnon. Its code space includes any writing system whatsoever with no regard to whether it was ever employed by human culture. More than this, since streams of ASCII remain the basis of all file transfers on the net and since ASCII is now a subset of Unicode and since Unicode provides a structure for exchange and storage of data, then we must recognize that this enconding is the fundamental encoding of all that is on the net.»

Sandy Baldwin’s work imagines the future of literary studies in a digital age. As coordinator of the Center for Literary Computing, he facilitates interdisciplinary research projects in the poetics of new media and the media ecology of literary institutions, using web-technologies, multimedia, hypertext, audio/video, and virtual environments. Sandy’s scholarly work explores media technologies as rhetorical and aesthetic objects, asking how media structure our thought and experience. His particular focus is on continuities and borrowings between literary theory and theories of digital multimedia.