(I invite your feedback on this rough answer to a computer scientist asking about CCS interpretation. What follows is directed more toward computer scientists but should contain enough simplification to enrage everyone.)

When I approach programmers about interpreting their code, a wry smile loads on their lips. After a bit of discussion, it becomes clear that they expect me to read their code as a high school English class would read a poem by Keats or a sonnet by Shakespeare. The smile also reveals their own ambivalence about their code.

On the one hand, they tend to dislike their code, feel a certain degree of shame about functions patched together or inelegantly assembled under severe time constraints. On the other hand, they are bemused that I would try to understand them through their code, like one reading their tea leaves or espresso grinds. However, Critical Code Studies does not have to map the mind of the inspired computer programmer. Some may pursue that tack, but the study of code does not depend on such speculation. In fact, this image of interpretation marks a moment of miscommunication between humanities scholars and computer scientists.

Interpretation is a sticky word in CCS. It means totally different things to programmers and humanities scholars. For computer scientists, interpreters are the programs that execute the high level code and interpretation allows the program to run. For the humanities, interpreters are all scholars and interpretation is a way of producing meaning about a text. Even in the English class, I would argue, interpretation isnt what it used to be.

Interpretation, at the start of the twenty-first century, is not that search for what the author secretly meant, that bizarre scavenger hunt that computer scientists probably recall from their Ms. Finetooths midterm essay questions. Instead, it is the systematic exploration of semiotic objects in order to explore culture and systems of meaning. The subtle difference is that while many scholars still focus their attention on specific sets of authors, authorial intent is and a single absolute meaning are not the ends of interpretation. Rather the cultural object becomes an opportunity to talk about something else. Just what that something else is depends on the disposition of the scholar, though the topic should be deeply tied to the work itself.

The shift from the quest for the hidden meaning of the romantic author to the use of the object as a cultural text for exploring systems of meaning and culture is largely the result of the influence of semiotics and Cultural Studies, the field that grew from the Birmingham school and Stuart Hall. Semiotics, or the study of signs and signification, opens up the interpretive process to examine all systems of information and meaning, what some might call communication, though that term is perhaps too strongly associated with another disciplinary disposition. Unlike literary studies which tends to focus on the artistically rendered collection of words (or performed text), Cultural Studies examines every object as a text for study.

The distance between the Haiku and the can of Coca Cola as texts marks the shift between the study of artistry and the broader study of signification. The Cultural Studies scholar does not ask what the Coca Cola Corporation intended by choosing red for the color of its cans and logo or what meaning it hi in the signature-style of the words on the can. Instead, she performs a semiotic analysis on the possible meanings conveyed by those details (the color red, the cursive script) of the can in the contexts of the many surrounding sign systems and discusses what the can and, by extension the company, have come to signify.

In some ways, this type of analysis reverses the process by which the can of Coke came to be, as it was designed by artists quite likely with feedback from other corporate executives in consultation with focus groups and consultants. At this point, one might note that the can is an object of commercial exchange. That aspect too becomes part of the cultural analysis. Would the critic have any less to say about a cultural artifact that had a less purposeful marketing purpose, like a user’s manual or a recipe in a cooking magazine? Probably not, but a reading of that text would require putting it in the context in which it is communicating: manuals, recipes, cooking culture.

So what is culture? Recently, I had a discussion with a scientist about Critical Code Studies, and I raised this notion of coding culture. He mentioned the high number of Indian programmers working in this particular part of the country and suggest I speak with them about the way their cultural background appears in code. While that inquiry would no doubt lead to some interesting investigations, his suggestion revealed something to me: for him, “culture” largely signified “ethnic culture.”

When a humanities scholar evokes “culture” she is typically referring to any social sphere, from particular workplaces to activities (skater culture, knitting culture), from regions of the world to virtual worlds (World of Warcraft), from realms of production and commerce to realms of scientific and academic inquiry. In programming, these cultures emerge around coding paradigms, languages, roles, and specializations just as much as they emerge from work environments, labs, and schools of thought. All of these cultures, or subcultures, possess rituals, discourse conventions, meeting grounds, et cetera. As a result, any artifact, object, or text, offers a glimpse or imprint of the culture in which it was produced and circulated.

This interpretation of a code as a cultural text, therefore, grows out of a very different analysis than the close examination of a lyric poem that seeks to answer some riddle hidden in the text by the author. In this context, even that poem is a cultural text whose meaning emerges not from a teasing author but from its engagement with systems of meaning (lyric poems, poetry in general, the literary tradition, the English language), cultural contexts, and the implicit associations of its readers based on their expectations and reading habits.

By this definition, both humanities scholars and computer scientists should be able to much more easily begin to interpret code together or to use code as a starting text for discussing other aspects of culture and in that process come to a fuller understanding of both the texts and its contexts.