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title: "Next book project: The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction, Reference, & the Archive in Contemporary Fiction"
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I just wanted to share some of the work I've been doing on one of my next book project, which is provisionally entitled _The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction, Reference, & the Archive in Contemporary Fiction_. I have roughly 45,000 words of the project down now (of a projected 90,000-word extent) and I also have an emergent structure.

    Part I: Introduction
        Chapter One: Silence

    Part II: The Aesthetics of Metadata
        Chapter Two: Redaction
        Chaoter Three: Reference
        Chapter Four: Symptom
        Chapter Five: Archive
        Chapter Six: Library

    Part III: Synthesis
        Chapter Seven: Conclusion

    Part IV: Surplus
        Appendix A: Textual Variants of _Cloud Atlas_
        Appendix B: _Cloud Atlas_ Variant JSON Data
        Appendix C: Interview with Mark Blacklock
        Bibliography

The work will include two previously published, but heavily modified, chapters. Chapter Five, on the Archive, is an extended interpretative/hermeneutic take on <a href="http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.82">“You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas</a> and textual scholarship in the digital looking at texts that feature _archives_ while Chapter Four is currently under submission but looks at objects in Emily St John Mandel's _Station Eleven_. Small portions of the introduction also featured in "On the Political Aesthetics of Metadata", Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016): n. pag. Web. 30 March 2016. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04">http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04</a>.

So, this is all exciting. I'm hoping to find an open access home for the book as it nears completion later next year.