[UPDATE: notices on Boing Boing and Slashdot, among many others.]

Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. On December 9, 2008—the sixteenth anniversary of the original “Transmission” event debuting Agrippa—The Agrippa Files (http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu) announces the release of two major new discoveries for scholars and fans:

* An emulated “run” of the entire original Agrippa poem, made possible by the forensic recovery of the code containing Gibson’s text from a mint condition Agrippa diskette loaned by collector Allan Chasanoff. This is the first public view of Agrippa in its original incarnation (that is, its custom-made behaviors and interface) since 1992. (direct link)

* An hour’s worth of never-before-seen footage from the December 9, 1992, public debut of Agrippa at the Americas Society in New York City during the “Transmission” event. This footage, shot by “Templar, Rosehammer, and Pseudophred” is the source of the transcription of the text that was released online within hours of the event.
(direct link)

These materials are accompanied by high-resolution images, stills from the video, screenshots, and a bit-level copy of the disk image itself, all publicly accessible with the permission of Kevin Begos, Jr., William Gibson, Allan Chasanoff, “Templar,” and “Rosehammer.”

We are also pleased to be releasing a major new full-length essay documenting the process of recovering these materials and exploring their significance for the study of the work: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.” (direct link)

The Agrippa Files, a project of the UC Santa Barbara English Department’s
Literature.Culture.Media Center, was aided by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and the Digital Forensics Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, in recovering and releasing these materials. Special thanks to Doug Reside and Matt Kirschenbaum for their efforts.

Alan Liu
Professor and Chair
Department of English,
UC Santa Barbara

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, December 2, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Renaissance Moving Pictures: From Sidney’s Funeral materials to Collaborative, Multimedia Nachleben.”
by ELIZABETH BEARDEN, STEPHANIE CLARKE-GRAHAM, ELIZABETH MARTIN, and MICHAEL QUILLIGAN

Come hear us talk about the creation and significance of our multimedia website dedicated to the funeral procession of Sir Philip Sidney, which took place in London, England in 1587. With a panoply of visual, poetic, and musical records, the funeral survives as one of the most thoroughly documented Elizabethan public events, and the distribution of the funeral ephemera to the public made it possible for Sidney’s contemporaries to recreate simulacra of the funeral in their own parlors. We will discuss why and how we have ‘re-done’ this famous courtier-poet’s obsequies, hopefully giving inspiration and insight to those of you who would like to direct similar projects. Extensive collaborative work, interdisciplinary and interinstitutional cooperation, and contributions from both grad and undergrad students have enabled us to create a project with both scholarly and pedagogical value on a low budget and with gusto.

Project Director: ELIZABETH B. BEARDEN, Assistant Professor, English.
Bearden is working on a book entitled “Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of Greek romance,” has published work in PMLA, and has a forthcoming article in JEMCS. Having received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature at NYU, she was hired at Maryland in 2006. Her research and teaching interests include early modern poetry and prose, the reception of antiquity in the Renaissance, word-image studies, Anglo-Spanish relations, transnationalism in romance, and the ways in which genre systems can reveal links between aesthetics and ethics in the early modern period.

Music Coordinator: STEPHANIE CLARKE-GRAHAM Ph.D. Candidate, English
Clarke-Graham is in her third year of the doctoral program in the Dept. of English. She intends to explore Early Modern English representations of the spaces of the Middle East and North Africa in her dissertation.

Transcriptions Coordinator: ELIZABETH MARTIN, Ph.D. Candidate, English.
Martin is a doctoral candidate specializing in late medieval and Renaissance literature. Her dissertation focuses on the development of the romance genre across these periods.

Visual Arts Coordinator: MICHAEL QUILLIGAN Ph. D. Candidate, English.
Quilligan is in his first year of the English Ph.D. program. His research focuses on romanticism, and he is the co-site manager for Romantic Circles, a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.

Coming up @MITH 12/9: Neil Fraistat (MITH), “Project Bamboo: An Open Meeting”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).