Critical Code Studies

I've been traveling for the past two weeks, heading off immediately after the end of the MLA conference in early January. So I've largely missed out on the storm of Twitter and blogosphere discussion about an emerging critical discourse that I'm excited to be involved in: Critical Code Studies. Fortunately, the leaders of this new community have done an amazing job of generating wider awareness, building on a conference last summer and an ongoing collaboration with the electronic book review (which is where I come in) to several panels at MLA and a thriving new forum over at HASTAC. Most recently, the CCS folks have published the proceedings of the conference last summer in collaboration with Vectors.

I'm excited to dive into the HASTAC conversation and to start thinking about how CCS connects to my own work. A lot of the research I'm doing on the literary marketplace explores how new computational algorithms are changing cultural systems (i.e. the seasons of book production, which operate a little like Hollywood's summer blockbusters, winter Oscar-bait formula). But what I want to dwell on briefly here is how we are all learning to "read" algorithms ourselves on the front end. That's one of the basic sources of challenge in videogames, for instance. An example from my dissertation work might be the way we reverse-engineer recommendation systems (to figure out why something was suggested to us).

A still better example is Slate's Facebook parodies, which at their best adapt the functionality and rhetoric of the site's algorithms for political satire. For instance, in "100 Days of Barack Obama's Facebook news feed," the authors mimic Facebook's social media tracking for comedic effect:





Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2217225/

Here we have humans 'faking' algorithms for their own purposes, and I think the satire effectively skewers Facebook as well as politics. Ultimately, Slate's pieces work because they ask us if American politics is turning into a stylized, algorithmically deterministic system, a sadly unwitting self-parody. Or, as Aaron Sorkin put it, whether "socializing on the Internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality."

Of course, the CCS people would point out that there's no real code here, but I guess my point is that we're all involved in interpreting algorithms in various ways, whether or not we're coders. Perhaps my contribution to the HASTAC forum will be some of my own Perl code that I no longer understand!

Things are Cooking at First Person

I’m happy to share news of some exciting developments on the First Person thread over at the electronic book review.

First, we published a great riposte by Daniel Worden to Sean O’Sullivan’s essay on Deadwood, one of my favorite shows. The original essay appeared in Third Person and discussed the inherent tension between the plot demands of the television episode and the television series. Worden responded by thinking about the different definitions of necessity at work in the show, including the crossover between the narratological manifest destiny of a canceled season and the kind that drove all those characters to settle the deadly Black Hills of South Dakota.

Second, and ongoing, we’re running a series of entries drawn from the Critical Code Studies Working Group. The group took on the challenge of interpreting software not just as the mechanism for all of our new digital texts and toys, but as text itself. The conversation is a virtual who’s who of software studies, and I’m very excited to be editing its ebr instantiation. I find the subject fascinating and this is a great experiment in new models for digital scholarship. In Mark Marino's introduction and the Week 1 discussion participants tried to hammer out some basic definitions and discussed readings of the infamous Anna Kournikova worm.