Forensics and memory: hyperhistory and liminal experience

Increasingly history is being produced in computer-based environments that owe conceptual debts to hypertext theory and computer games. This media facilitates liminal, process-based, explorative experience. What happens when history becomes a liminal experience? I will discuss four different works of hypertextual and programmed media, and consider what sort of history is facilitated. The computer has been appropriated as a means to examine or reflect upon the past in different ways. Competing principles of forensics and memory, which reflect competing technoscientific and humanistic ways in which the computer is put to work in contemporary culture, means that representations of the past in computer-based media are evolving, and with them, understandings of the role of the past on the present. I will discuss the way forensics and memory reveal different relationships with the past in computer-based history with specific reference to one work, Life After Wartime by Ross Gibson and Kate Richards (2003). In a rudimentary way this article suggests new ways in which academic writing may be produced, by exploiting intersections between networked communication, academic writing, interface design and programming.