Next book project: The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction, Reference, & the Archive in Contemporary Fiction

Originally published on eve.gd on 19 November 2016, last updated 6 September 2026.

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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 “You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 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. http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04.

“You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04

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

References

This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.

1. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas’, Open Library of Humanities, Open Library of the Humanities, 10 August 2016 <https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.82>

2. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘On the Political Aesthetics of Metadata’, Alluvium: 21st-Century Writing, 21st-Century Approaches, Open Library of the Humanities, 31 March 2016 <https://doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04>

https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.82
https://doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04