[…]open up spaces of discovery. Nevertheless, it was our shared text for Week 4 of the Critical Code Studies Working Group – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s first chapter from her forthcoming book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory – that challenged me to rethink the anecdote of my dad’s fingertips in relationship to notions of ritual and magic that undergird so much of our technological practice. In this chapter, Chun introduces the term “sourcery” to signify what she sees as contemporary culture’s fetishism of source code. Software (source code), Chun claims, “is a magical force that promises to bring together the […]
[…]the spot. While something of a special case, then, livecoding raises broader issues for Critical Code Studies, especially questions related to the definition of programming and the visibility of code. As John Bell pointed out, livecoding further applies pressure to the valuation of “scripting” over “coding”: the former is not considered “real” programming because of the use of high-level languages for small tasks. The Ruby on Rails framework was promoted using an “amazing and carefully scripted series of demo magic tricks,” in Jeremy Douglass’ words: on a terminal window projected for an audience, a few scripts generated a basic but […]
[…]narrative experiences. A quick announcement (and hearty congratulations!): the Critical Code Studies Working Group—organized by Mark C. Marino, Jeremy Douglass, Catherine Griffiths, Ali Rachel Pearl, and Teddy Roland—will complete its 2018 online “think tank” on February 5. Participants have been plenty and discussions have been rich; the CCSWG 2018 website becomes a valuable resource for those in the e-literature community, as well as for researchers, teachers, and enthusiasts who consider code in relation to the humanities and humanistic issues. We look forward to 2020’s Working Group! Through Joseph McElroy’s essay “Forms of Censorship; Censorship as Form,” ebr readers can quickly make […]
ebr is delighted to announce that the 6th biennial Critical Code Studies Working Group has begun, led by Mark Marino and Jeremy Douglass. Many members of ELO and readers of ebr are contributors to this and previous CCSWGs, and this year’s Group extends previous conversations by focusing on special topics such as Indigenous Programming and Feminist AI. You can follow ongoing conversations (January 20 to February 9, 2020) as they unfold on the Group’s website. * This month, ebr publishes “At a Heightened Level of Intensity: A Discussion of the Philosophy and Poetics of Language in John Cayley’s Digital Poetics,” […]
[…]to Critical Code Studies (Main Thread).” CCS Working Group 2020, http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/57/week-1-introduction-to-critical-code-studies-main-thread. Marino, Mark C. Critical Code Studies › Electronic Book Review. 31 Jan. 2012, […]
This essay is a general introduction to a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. As each week is published on ebr, it will be indexed here. Week 1: Introduction Discussion Week 2: Introduction Discussion Week […]
This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. As each week is published on ebr, it will be indexed here. Week 1: Introduction by Mark Marino Discussion This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. As each week is published on ebr, it will be indexed here. Week 1: Introduction by Mark Marino […]
[…]alone to define a given canon for an entire field of practice is taking a bold, or even arrogant, critical position. The critical reception of a work might be the one area in which we could hope for a clearly empirical measure of canonicity. Yet Ensslin asserts a particularly privileged position with regard to reception when she writes that: The research situation with most hypertexts is such that reviews and academic papers are written by hypertext supporters. Therefore, criticism tends to be rather opinionated and to emphasize the academically interesting sides of a hypertext rather than its cumbersome attributes. Evaluations […]
[…]is a kind of agency revealed here that manifests most powerfully through the water. The poem, the code, and the reader are all very important, to be sure, especially within the context of media studies, which has tended to fetishize the technological at the expense of the natural. For this the chreod offers a powerful lesson: it is the water’s pull that powers the text. Indeed, it is the “voice” of the water that is paramount when it comes to thinking about environmental fragility. Communicating the contingent nature of ocean water is, according to Poets for Living Waters, one of […]
[…]and analytical tools of postclassical narratology, ludology, applied linguistics, critical code studies, and semiotics (starting around the mid-2000s). Spear-headed by pioneering early hypertext reader-response work done for example by David Miall and Teresa Dobson, and further refined by scholars like Anne Mangen, Adriaan van der Weel, Colin Gardner, James Pope, and, most recently, by the UK-based “Reading Digital Fiction” research group (Bell, Ensslin, van der Bom, and Smith; see also Ensslin, Bell, Skains, and van der Bom), a third wave of e-lit scholarship has been producing empirical insights into how readers perceive, process, and communicate experiences of multilinear reading, of […]