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“Finding and Evaluating the Code” by David Shepard

Ξ March 13th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ books, articles |

The website for N. Katherine Hayles’ latest work New Horizons for the Literary just out from University of Notre Dame Press includes a an essay from David Shapard entitled, “Finding and Evaluating the Code.” Shepard is a Ph.D. student who would no doubt fit in well with our work here at Critical Code Studies.

The article offers useful definitions for Critical Code Studies, particularly revolving around the Electronic Literature Organization’s ELC, volume 1, specifically referencing the works: StudPoetry, Code Movie 1, and carrier (becoming symborg).

This article can be seen as a Critical Code Studies starter kit. See Shepard’s note that:

This essay has only been able briefly to sketch some starting points for accessing and interpreting code. I hope that it will serve as an inspiration for thought rather than a definitive statement on practice or interpretation.

His introduction serves as an abstract:

Lev Manovich’s first Principle of New Media, numerical representation, begins with the axiom “All new media objects, whether they are created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code” (49). Though this coded representation is sometimes invisible to the user, the complexity of digital representation can be pushed to the foreground; for example, carrier (becoming symborg) switches between different platforms–HTML, Java, Shockwave, and VRML–for different purposes, begging the question of what such a heterogeneous collage shows about the essential unity of a work. Code can be experienced subtly but still have an impact on the user’s experience. Understanding the relationship between these levels can seem like a daunting prospect, but it can yield insights into a work. This essay serves as a guide to levels of code and their components, beginning with some general principles that will apply to any work and ending with an exploration of these ideas in three works that use three different languages.

Dreaming in Code

Ξ January 11th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ CCS, books, Java |

Books of Note and Java for n00bies

One of our projects here at CCS will be to mention books that contribute to Critical Code Studies (adding them to our LibraryThing account). Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software offers some strong material history and reflection on development of a specific and open source piece of software, Mitch Kapor’s Chandlor. It gives a glimpse at the shear amount of human and machine activity and conflict surrounding the production of working code, all of which can inform CCS readings.

An excerpt offers one of the already typical moves of CCS, to perform a reading of a “Hello, World” program, especially in a comparative context. Nick Montfort, Michael Mateas, Beth Coleman, and I (among others) have already offered “Hello, World” readings.
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