Imagine that -- unfolding in real time -- you find a perfect real-world example that, with eerie clarity, embodies almost all the concepts you've devoted yourself to teaching and studying in the past ten or so years.

Imagine that you're now in the middle of teaching a unit on the materiality and persistence of digital culture, to a class that consists mostly of upper-level journalism students who have been blogging academically for years.  You've recently assigned Espen Aarseth's close reading of Infocom's interactive fiction work Deadline, and you just finished going through Matt Kirchenbaum's detailed forensic analysis of a 5 1/4 floppy disk containing the interactive fiction game Mystery House. 

And imagine that someone (not you) gets ahold of some archival material from Infocom. More than just some archival material, a complete copy of the company's networked hard drive, bristling with e-mails, production notes, source code, and demo files -- and starts posting juicy details on his blog.

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy