Comments on: Session Proposal: Critical Code Studies

By: Jean Bauer

Jean Bauer — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:14:55 +0000

Some possible materials — and Mark I know you already know this, but . . .

HASTAC Scholars did a online forum on Critical Code Studies back in January. I hosted the Code Critique spin off. There were some great conversations in the main thread (and some cool code bits in the Critique section.

www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/critical-code-studies

www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/code-critiques

By: briancroxall

briancroxall — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:42:02 +0000

I’d like the opportunity to get an overview to Critical Code Studies.

I agree with Trevor that reading code must necessarily be ambiguous…but that’s just shows that it is indeed a linguistic act(ion) (and a performative one at that). For that reason, I don’t know that we have to consider the full context. We don’t have to have Jhumpa Lahiri’s manuscripts, her emails, diaries, or grocery lists to do some analysis of The Namesake. To what degree is/should code be any different? There are naturally scholars and scholarly approaches that would like or benefit from those additional materials, but it isn’t per force necessary. It’s interesting to ask, then, to what degree CCS is a return to formalism…

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:09:04 +0000

Great topic Mark. In terms of the session do you want to have a general conversation about the idea? Or, should we try and come up with some code snippet examples and try and break into groups and do some interpreting?

In the case of the former, I would want to get into it with people about the inherent ambiguity of interpreting code. It just seems to me that code, while very interesting to study, really only makes sense in a broader notion of software studies and or platform studies where one would imagine interpreting software as traces that we need to contextualize with any other materials (ie, dev documents, arguments in the forums, discussions between users, etc) In this case I would be interested in why code gets special treatment and privilege over the other artifacts that make up our historical record of software. For example, software documentation would seem to be as rich a set of materials for analysis as code itself.

In the case of the latter, I could imagine that we could pull some fun code snippets from some of the open source versions of a bunch of games (Or any software for that matter, but I just imagine it is way more involved to get into analysis of something that is less grandiose).

For example, we could dig into something like the Indian Settlements Schema file in FreeCol see freecol.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freecol/freecol/trunk/schema/data/data-indianSettlement.xsd?revision=8212&view=markup