Critical Code Studies - The Diigo Meta page

• 18 Apr 17
  

  Ernesto Priani

  Codigo humanidadesdigitales

  • This emphasis on functionality neglects the meaning that code bears for its human audience. For code, especially mid- to high-level languages, exists not solely for computers, which could operate on machine language (essentially, representations of electronic signals), but for programmers as well. Therefore, the computer may be one recipient of the code but there is also the programmer, other programmers, and at times even users who have access to its text.
  • In his posting on the electronic book review, “The Code is Not the Text (unless it is the text),” John Cayley argues against a common notion in new media scholarship, that computer code is the text that we, as humanities scholars, study.
  • to reveal codes, to make the mechanism of production visible to the viewer moving it from background to foreground”
  • I would like to propose that we no longer speak of the code as a text in metaphorical terms, but that we begin to analyze and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance in excess of its functional utility.
  • Critical Code Studies (CCS) is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context.
  • CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.
  • Through CCS, practitioners may critique the larger human and computer systems, from the level of the computer to the level of the society in which these code objects circulate and exert influence.
  • Much of the current examination of code seems to revolve around efficiency, reusability, and modularity. My own critical approach will stress meaning, implication, and connotation, though not in terms of a self-contained system of meaning but with respect to the broader social contexts. While a computer scientist might argue for or against various pragmatic approaches, scholars of CCS will analyze the extra-functional significance of the code.
  • These analytic projects will require programmers to help open up the contents and workings of programs, acting as theorists along with other scholars, as they reflect on the relationships between the code itself, the coding architecture, the functioning of the code, and specific programming choices or expressions, to that which it acts upon, outputs, processes, and represents.
  • If as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has announced, “software is ideology” we might also say computer code is ideology, yet an ideology that is doubly hidden by our illiteracy and by the very screens on which its output delights and distracts (“Stroking” 207). While open source embodies a particular ideology that makes code accessible for analysis, CCS will analyze more than open source programs. CCS will look broadly at choices in paradigms (such as object-oriented approaches) and closely to specific lines of code.
  • The focus of CCS is not on making code that has aesthetic value and additional meaning but a view of code as already having meaning beyond its functionality since it is a form of symbolic expression and interaction.
  • Fundamental to CCS is the assumption that code is a social, semiotic system employing grammar and rhetoric. As Rita Raley argues, “Code may in a general sense be opaque and legible only to specialists, much like a cave painting’s sign system, but it has been inscribed, programmed, written. It is conditioned and concretely historical” (24). A scholar at the Institute for Cultural Research in Lancaster, UK, Adrian MacKenzie writes, “Code is written and run within situated practices, with reference to particular domains, and within particular orderings and disorderings of collective life. Its forms and abstractions are attached to lives” (19). The way this sign system circulates within actor-networks of computers and machines is also the way it develops connotations worthy of interpretation.
  • In addition to symbols and characters in the program files themselves, paratextual features will also be important for informed readers. The history of the program, the author, the programming language, the genre, the funding source for the research and development (be it military, industrial, entertainment, or other), all shape meaning, although any one reading might emphasize just a few of these aspects. The goal need not be code analysis for code’s sake, but analyzing code to better understand programs and the networks of other programs and humans they interact with, organize, represent, manipulate, transform, and otherwise engage.
  • In his essay, Cayley recognizes multiple audiences for the code. At first glance, the only audience appears to be the machine itself, but as mentioned, there are humans as well. First, the programmer must read the code even while compositing it. Second, other programmers may read the code. Third, non-programmers, such as project managers or audiences of interdisciplinary conferences, may read the code. The code may also end up in the hands of hackers. Even the machine on which the computer runs may prove to be multiple audiences, as parts of the code are passed to other processes and other parts of the machine.
  • Code as Language” argues that “if language is defined as written symbols organized into combinations and patterns to express and communicate thoughts and feelings - language that executes - then coding is language” (1). Glazier is establishing code as a creative, even literary act, a kind of inscription or “thinking through thought” (1)
  • My main error was analyzing Quicksort aside from its historical, material, social context.

  14 more annotations...

• 20 Mar 17
  

  Dan Verständig

  codestudies17 codestudies code programming technology algortihms

• 21 Feb 15
  

  hiteleven
  • The computer here merely shuffles the words as so many strings of data. It does not interpret, only uses those strings. However, those words in quotation marks are significant to us, the humans who read the code. “Hello” and “World” have significance, just as the function name “print” has a significance that goes far beyond its instructions to the computer and gestures toward a material culture of ink and writing surfaces.
  • While we examine programming architecture and admire modularity and efficiency, the study of computer code does not currently emphasize interpretation, the search for and production of meaning.
  • For code, especially mid- to high-level languages, exists not solely for computers, which could operate on machine language (essentially, representations of electronic signals), but for programmers as well. Therefore, the computer may be one recipient of the code but there is also the programmer, other programmers, and at times even users who have access to its text.
  • People like to project humanity onto the computer, but is it possible that with regard to coding we do just the opposite and strip the code of its human significance, imagining that it is a sign system within which the extensive analyses of semiotic systems and signification, connotation, and denotation do not apply?
  • I would like to propose that we no longer speak of the code as a text in metaphorical terms, but that we begin to analyze and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance in excess of its functional utility.
  • humanities scholars can help by conjecturing on the meaning of code to all those who encounter it both directly by reading it or indirectly by encountering the effects of the programs it creates. In effect, I am proposing that we can read and explicate code the way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry that I call Critical Code Studies (CCS).
  • The focus of CCS is not literature made of code or code that is literature, although these may benefit from its techniques. Rather, I propose that code itself is a cultural text worthy of analysis and rich with possibilities for interpretation. Of course, some code will yield more opportunities for interpretation than others, but that can also be a product of the critics themselves.
  • Critical Code Studies (CCS) is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context. CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.
  • Meaning grows out of the functioning of the code but is not limited to the literal processes the code enacts. Through CCS, practitioners may critique the larger human and computer systems, from the level of the computer to the level of the society in which these code objects circulate and exert influence.
  • In conversation, hacker culture researcher, Doug Thomas proposed a purely hypothetical example a reading of facial recognition software that might discover an encoded practice of racial programming.

            

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    Like literary analysis, CCS is an interpretive process rather than an instrumentally proscriptive or solely descriptive process. While other branches (lines of flight) of code studies may be concerned with pragmatics, CCS focuses on meaning, read from the often collaborative and certainly iterative performance that is coding.
  • My own critical approach will stress meaning, implication, and connotation, though not in terms of a self-contained system of meaning but with respect to the broader social contexts.
  • While open source embodies a particular ideology that makes code accessible for analysis, CCS will analyze more than open source programs. CCS will look broadly at choices in paradigms (such as object-oriented approaches) and closely to specific lines of code.
  • The focus of CCS is not on making code that has aesthetic value and additional meaning but a view of code as already having meaning beyond its functionality since it is a form of symbolic expression and interaction.
  • A scholar at the Institute for Cultural Research in Lancaster, UK, Adrian MacKenzie writes, “Code is written and run within situated practices, with reference to particular domains, and within particular orderings and disorderings of collective life. Its forms and abstractions are attached to lives” (19). The way this sign system circulates within actor-networks of computers and machines is also the way it develops connotations worthy of interpretation.
  • Within CCS, if code is part of the program or a paratext (understood broadly), it contributes to meaning. I would also include interpretations of markup languages and scripts, as extensions of code.
  • The goal need not be code analysis for code’s sake, but analyzing code to better understand programs and the networks of other programs and humans they interact with, organize, represent, manipulate, transform, and otherwise engage.
  • Our discussions suggest to me once again that the approaches of semiotic analysis common to critical theory in the humanities are foreign to the disciplinary emphases of programming. So, a movement toward consideration of the code as a semiotic unit that can be explicated, interpreted, read, and perhaps misread, seems a significant change.
  • Second, and more relevant here, unlike film processing, code is not merely a means or procedure, it is a text, which is often accessible after the program has executed. This text can be read, understood, and of course, altered.
  • Where the line between mathematics and CCS is, I do not wish to declare. I would suggest that there are qualities that give a program more footholds for interpretation.
  • Again, key to CCS is an understanding that the act of encoding is not a question of finding one correct command out of a codex of commands, but of choosing (and at times creating) a particular combination of lines to build a structure that resonates and operates aesthetically, functionally, and even conceptually with the other discourse of encoded objects as well as mathematical and natural language discourse.
  • More importantly, and I hope this is not too vague, there are implications in the way a code tries to perform a function that bear the imprint of epistemologies, cultural assumptions about gender, race and sexuality; economic philosophies; and political paradigms. This brief litany does not begin to get at the more computer-specific issues.
  • Too few critics have dealt with specific lines of code or aspects of programming languages even when analyzing codework.
  • Notably in “On Code and Codework” (2006) Sondheim interrogates the relationship between “coding” and “encoding,” marking one as the practice of the programmer and the other as the process of the program when handling input. Rather than treating code as static method of signification only available to programmers, he talks about how the computer encodes input.
  • My main error was analyzing Quicksort aside from its historical, material, social context. For an algorithm such as Quicksort, the code meets the social realm at the site of its implementation and in the context of the application in which it is used. I was not engaging the cultural origins of Quicksort within the history of computation or even a particular incarnation of Quicksort in a language (I was using pseudocode). Without discussing the human context of the Quicksort code in terms of authorship, use, development, circulation, or operations, I was left with little more than a process
  • This context involves human machines operating in actor-networks. Thus, a simple looping subroutine, say, might remind one of the eternal return of the repressed, but unless that metaphor has significance with respect to the particular, material context of the script itself, the interpretation is not very significant. However, if one found a recursive loop in a program designed to psychoanalyze its users, perhaps a connection could be drawn between recursion and the psychoanalytic view of the return of the repressed. Thus, while these computer programs are quite meaningful, they will only yield their meaning to the extent to which we interrogate their material and social-historical context to elucidate some aspect of our cultures.
  • Cultural critics often speak abstractly of coding practices or the processes of code without getting to the code itself. My emphasis, however, should not understate the need for interpreting these structures with an eye towards fundamental human concerns, concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; concerning the military-industrial-entertainment and academic complex; concerning surveillance and control over electronic systems-to name but a few.

  24 more annotations...

• 18 May 13
  

  Oreto Doménech

  elit MÀSTER

• 17 Mar 13
  

  Bill Wolff
  • But of course, the computer does not understand what it says. Literally speaking, the computer does not even interpret that code.
  • The computer here merely shuffles the words as so many strings of data. It does not interpret, only uses those strings. However, those words in quotation marks are significant to us, the humans who read the code. "Hello" and "World" have significance, just as the function name "print" has a significance that goes far beyond its instructions to the computer and gestures toward a material culture of ink and writing surfaces.
  • the study of computer code does not currently emphasize interpretation, the search for and production of meaning.
  • Therefore, the computer may be one recipient of the code but there is also the programmer, other programmers, and at times even users who have access to its text.
  • He defines codework as "literature which uses, addresses, and incorporates code: as underlying language-animating or language-generating programming, as a special type of language itself, or as an intrinsic part of the new surface language or 'interface text' in networked and programmable media."
  • As she explains, "codework does not suggest, nor does it need to, that code - the algorithmic score, the instructions that govern and produce the system - itself should be privileged."Thus Mez's works are valid codeworks because they play with the structures of code on the display level of the text.
  • nd yet for Raley, the use of coding elements on surface text serves to disrupt our reading (and processing) practices, by means of defamiliarization. It is because this hybrid language of code and natural language cannot be interpreted that it can make familiar processing practices, including reading, strange, producing "a disordering which cannot be predicted"
  • disrupts the way we as readers compile and interpret these coding symbols in relation to their broader use and operation in the technologies that would otherwise process us without interruption.
  • I would like to propose that we no longer speak of the code as a text in metaphorical terms, but that we begin to analyze and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance in excess of its functional utility. While computer scientists can theorize on the most useful approaches to code, humanities scholars can help by conjecturing on the meaning of code to all those who encounter it both directly by reading it or indirectly by encountering the effects of the programs it creates.
  • I propose that code itself is a cultural text worthy of analysis and rich with possibilities for interpretation. Of course, some code will yield more opportunities for interpretation than others, but that can also be a product of the critics themselves.
  • Critical Code Studies (CCS) is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context. CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.
  • we might also say computer code is ideology, yet an ideology that is doubly hidden by our illiteracy and by the very screens on which its output delights and distracts ("Stroking" 207). While open source embodies a particular ideology that makes code accessible for analysis, CCS will analyze more than open source programs. CCS will look broadly at choices in paradigms (such as object-oriented approaches) and closely to specific lines of code.
  • Fundamental to CCS is the assumption that code is a social, semiotic system employing grammar and rhetoric. As Rita Raley argues, "Code may in a general sense be opaque and legible only to specialists, much like a cave painting's sign system, but it has been inscribed, programmed, written. It is conditioned and concretely historical" (24).
  • Adrian MacKenzie writes, "Code is written and run within situated practices, with reference to particular domains, and within particular orderings and disorderings of collective life. Its forms and abstractions are attached to lives" (19). The way this sign system circulates within actor-networks of computers and machines is also the way it develops connotations worthy of interpretation.
  • Kittler traces the derivation of the word back to codex and further to codicilla, "the small tablets of stripped wood coated with wax in which letters could be inscribed." In its later form, "codex," the word signifies "simply the name of the bound book of law." Code thus becomes the means and medium of long-distance control. Kittler follows the term from classical empires to nation states to the moment when it becomes synonymous with "cipher."

  • Central to control is the ability to make "code" a ubiquitous, universal operator. Moreover, he adds,

     

    But perhaps code means nothing more than codex did at one time: the law of precisely that empire which holds us in subjection and forbids us even to articulate this sentence. At all events, the major research institutions which stand to profit most from such announcements proclaim with triumphant certainty that there is nothing in the universe, from the virus to the Big Bang, which is not code.

     

    Here, the military-industrial complex employs the codes for control, and by making "code" the essence of all life, the few elite, literate researchers establish themselves as the only mediators.

  • What can be interpreted?

     

    Everything. The code, the documentation, the comments, the structures - all will be open to interpretation. Greater understanding of (and access to) these elements will help critics build complex readings
  • I would also include interpretations of markup languages and scripts, as extensions of code. Within the code, there will be the actual symbols but also, more broadly, procedures, structures, and gestures. There will be paradigmatic choices made in the construction of the program, methods chosen over others and connotations.
  • but analyzing code to better understand programs and the networks of other programs and humans they interact with, organize, represent, manipulate, transform, and otherwise engage.
  • His apparent specialty, usability, or the development of easily read human-computer interfaces, the facilitation of interaction between human and machine realms. The relationship between code and coder, the program that makes computers speak to a "world" and the programmer who works (for the government-funded, space-exploration C^4 institution) to make computers speak more clearly, creates meaning.
  • It is an artifact circulating in a broader exchange. All these contextualizing aspects potentially affect the way "Hello World" means.
  • Again, key to CCS is an understanding that the act of encoding is not a question of finding one correct command out of a codex of commands, but of choosing (and at times creating) a particular combination of lines to build a structure that resonates and operates aesthetically, functionally, and even conceptually with the other discourse of encoded objects as well as mathematical and natural language discourse.
  • If code is language, does that make programs poetry? In "The Aesthetics of Generative Code," Geoff Cox, Alex McClean, and Adrian Ward compare code to poetry, as they develop some techniques for interpreting it. In their words, "Evidently, code works like poetry in that it plays with structures of language itself, as well as our corresponding perceptions" (Cox, McLean, and Ward). Like Cayley and others, they argue that code's meaning is bound up with its execution. However, their reading is not limited to the performance of the code, as they also stress "more purposeful arrangements of code by the programmer," noting for example that even the visual of code is for human readers, since "the same code could be expressed in any shape or arrangement and would run the same output."
  • Critics have already set the stage for this analytical project. Notably, Cayley and Glazier have declared that "programming is writing" (Hayles 2004: 80) and more recently that "encoding is writing" (Glazier 2006: 4). Cramer has written, "I believe it is a common mistake to claim that machine language would be only readable to machines and hence irrelevant for human art and literature and, vice versa, literature and art would be unrelated to formal languages" (2001). Although these scholars primarily focus on the relationship of code to literary objects, their statements certainly anticipate, incite, and inspire CCS.
  • "Code is not the enemy anymore than it is the savior. Rather code is increasingly positioned as language's pervasive partner. Implicit in the juxtaposition is the intermediation of human though and machine intelligence, with all the dangers, possibilities, liberations, and complexities this implies" (61).
  • Interpretation requires reading an object in its (post)human context through a particular critical lens. This context involves human machines operating in actor-networks. Thus, a simple looping subroutine, say, might remind one of the eternal return of the repressed, but unless that metaphor has significance with respect to the particular, material context of the script itself, the interpretation is not very significant. However, if one found a recursive loop in a program designed to psychoanalyze its users, perhaps a connection could be drawn between recursion and the psychoanalytic view of the return of the repressed. Thus, while these computer programs are quite meaningful, they will only yield their meaning to the extent to which we interrogate their material and social-historical context to elucidate some aspect of our cultures.
  • Code increasingly shapes, transforms, and limits our lives, our relationships, our art, our cultures, and our civic institutions. It is time to take code out from behind quotation marks, to move beyond execution to comment, to document, and to interpret. Let us make the code the text.

  25 more annotations...

• 11 Jan 13
  

  plantin jean-christophe

  critical_code_studies code digital_method

• 04 Dec 12
  

  Jean-Rémy Duboc
• 02 Dec 12
  

  Kathi Berens

  Many useful explications that pave way for 10PRINT.  Note also the longevity of some of these collaborations; 10PRINT is just the most recent iteration & recombination of some of these folks.

  CCS crit_code ebr Mark_Marino

  • code is not merely a means or procedure, it is a text, which is often accessible after the program has executed. This text can be read, understood, and of course, altered. The clearer analogy is the analysis of a musical score, a play script, blueprints, circuit diagrams, or any print text, since none of these can be processed or executed without being read.
  • Most of the work until now has dealt with broad concepts regarding code. Too few critics have dealt with specific lines of code or aspects of programming languages even when analyzing codework. The critics reviewed below have begun the process of analyzing specific programming practices, computer languages, and the very symbols of code in the kinds of close readings necessary for CCS to be engaged in a thorough reading of these texts. Their essays help to frame CCS even while they demonstrate how something as small as a parenthesis can signify beyond its functional application.
  • "I believe it is a common mistake to claim that machine language would be only readable to machines and hence irrelevant for human art and literature and, vice versa, literature and art would be unrelated to formal languages"
  • Mateas and Montfort
  • 'Good' code simultaneously specifies a mechanical process and talks about this mechanical process to a human reader" (10)

  3 more annotations...

• 30 Jan 12
  

  Nick Gall

  Critical Code Studies (CCS) is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context. CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be

  academic literarytheory criticalcodestudies programminglanguages programming humanities pinboardimport20141106

• 25 Mar 11
  

  Todd Suomela

  ""Hello World" is one of the first programs that computer scientists write in a programming language. The program, usually only a few lines of code, causes the computer to output a greeting, as if it were speaking."

  programming learning code interpretation criticism

• 13 Jan 11
  

  Sarah Zurhellen

  code marino technology critical_code_studies programming

  • With this distinction, language becomes divided between the operational  code and data. The computer here merely shuffles the words as so many strings of data. It does not interpret, only uses those  strings. However, those words in quotation marks are significant to us, the humans who read the code. "Hello" and "World"  have significance, just as the function name "print" has a significance that goes far beyond its instructions to the computer  and gestures toward a material culture of ink and writing surfaces.
  • This emphasis on functionality neglects the meaning that code bears for its  human audience. For code, especially mid- to high-level languages, exists not solely for computers, which could operate on  machine language (essentially, representations of electronic signals), but for programmers as well. Therefore, the computer  may be one recipient of the code but there is also the programmer, other programmers, and at times even users who have access  to its text.
  • People like to project humanity onto the computer, but is it possible that with regard  to coding we do just the opposite and strip the code of its human significance, imagining that it is a sign system within  which the extensive analyses of semiotic systems and signification, connotation, and denotation do not apply?
  • She compares Cayley's privileging of the code (over the output) to Adorno's "remarks  about music as merely a consequence of the score." As she explains, "codework does not suggest, nor does it need to, that  code - the algorithmic score, the instructions that govern and produce the system - itself should be privileged
  • the use of coding elements on surface text serves to disrupt our reading (and processing) practices, by  means of defamiliarization. It is because this hybrid language of code and natural language cannot be interpreted that it  can make familiar processing practices, including reading, strange, producing "a disordering which cannot be predicted"
  • a radical political praxis in codework
  • "the impetus of contemporary code art" as "to reveal codes, to make the mechanism of production  visible to the viewer
  • Regardless of whether  or not these texts compile at the level of the computer, codework, in Raley's analysis, disrupts the way we as readers compile  and interpret these coding symbols in relation to their broader use and operation in the technologies that would otherwise  process us without interruption
  • Florian Cramer in Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination

  7 more annotations...

• 25 Aug 10
  

  kiberens
  • When I have spoken to programmers and computer science professors about this idea, they ask a lot of questions about what  a critical approach would mean. Our discussions suggest to me once again that the approaches of semiotic analysis common to  critical theory in the humanities are foreign to the disciplinary emphases of programming. So, a movement toward consideration  of the code as a semiotic unit that can be explicated, interpreted, read, and perhaps misread, seems a significant change.
  • This text can be read, understood, and of course, altered. The clearer analogy is the analysis  of a musical score, a play script, blueprints, circuit diagrams, or any print text, since none of these can be processed or  executed without being read. Or perhaps code is more like a spell or incantation: to read it is to cast it.
  • Again,  key to CCS is an understanding that the act of encoding is not a question of finding one correct command out of a codex of  commands, but of choosing (and at times creating) a particular combination of lines to build a structure that resonates and  operates aesthetically, functionally, and even conceptually with the other discourse of encoded objects as well as mathematical  and natural language discourse
  • In my early attempts at what Wardrip-Fruin would equate to interpreting  a stop sign, I suggested Quicksort as a metaphor for social organization in communities, drawing out an analogy for the way  a neighborhood street or even highway may serve to divide and conquer a demographic. However, though my analysis said something  about neighborhood hierarchies, it offered little insight on Quicksort itself, nor did it draw from Quicksort a lesson about  the society from which it came. My main error was analyzing Quicksort aside from its historical, material, social context.

  2 more annotations...

• 21 Jun 10
  

  Daniel Rourke

  by Mark C. Marino
  
  The computer does not understand what it says. Literally speaking, the computer does not even interpret that code. When the function is called, the computer will print (output) the list of the two atoms (as symbolic units are called in

  code theory programming language academic writing computing art critical_code_studies mark-c-marino technology kittler reading friedrich-kittler computers machinemachine paper

• 31 Jan 10
  

  micha cardenas

  code theory criticalcodestudies

• 29 Jun 09
  

  advee77

  Explanation of critical code studies in electronic book review, by Mark Marino

  electronic literature marino critical code studies code

  • People like to project humanity onto the computer, but is it possible that with regard  to coding we do just the opposite and strip the code of its human significance, imagining that it is a sign system within  which the extensive analyses of semiotic systems and signification, connotation, and denotation do not apply?
  • Despite their disagreement over the genre of codework, both Raley and Cayley suggest that code is "a special type of  language" that is worthy of the attention of literary scholars
  • I would like to propose that we no longer speak of the code as a text in metaphorical terms, but that we begin to analyze  and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance  in excess of its functional utility. While computer scientists can theorize on the most useful approaches to code, humanities  scholars can help by conjecturing on the meaning of code to all those who encounter it both directly by reading it or indirectly  by encountering the effects of the programs it creates. In effect, I am proposing that we can read and explicate code the  way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry that I call Critical Code Studies (CCS).
  • CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and  can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive  methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.
  • Through CCS, practitioners may  critique the larger human and computer systems, from the level of the computer to the level of the society in which these  code objects circulate and exert influence.
  • Everything. The code, the documentation, the comments, the structures - all will be open to interpretation.
  • gestures
  • The goal need not be code analysis for code's sake, but analyzing code to better understand programs  and the networks of other programs and humans they interact with, organize, represent, manipulate, transform, and otherwise  engage.
  • This call from Hayles and others envisions a leserevolution
    Coined by Rolf Engelsing, this "reading revolution" marked the transition in Europe during the 18th century from "intensive"  reading of a few hegemonic texts to "extensive" reading of newspapers broadsides, and journals (Graham). Librarian Peter S.  Graham also notes similar findings by David Hall when studying reading practices in 17th century America. As Toby Miller explains,  In this moment, "The mass media posed a threat to established elites by enabling people to become independently informed and  distracted from their one true path of servitude" (7).3 of code, a moment when code comes to the people.

  7 more annotations...

• 24 Jun 09
  

  Lisa Spiro

  software_studies

• 

  dh09

• 16 Mar 09
  

  Lori Emerson

  marino code codework

• 14 Mar 09
  

  snichrd

  writing theory programming criticalcode academic critical_code_studies

• 06 Apr 08
  

  mario64

  "Hello World" is one of the first programs that computer scientists write in a programming language. The program, usually only a few lines of code, causes the computer to output a greeting, as if it were speaking.

  hello_world programming

• 11 Jan 08
  

  Michel Bauwens

  To critique code merely for its functionality or aesthetics is to approach code with only a small portion of our analytic tools.

  P2P-Theory P2P-Epistemology P2P

• 16 Nov 07
  

  Bradley Dilger

  Article which mentions From A to

  code writing academe computing english publishing

• 29 Jan 07
  

  Anne Helmond

  code language theory academic thesis softwarestudies

• 22 Jan 07
  

  Mark Marino

  cayley code codework critical_code_studies criticism knuth mez sondheim uci

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