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Participants: Ben Allen * Stephanie August * Damon Loren Baker * Theo Ellin Ballew * Ivette Bayo Urban * John Bell * Paisley Benaza * Kathi Berens * David Berry * Sayan Bhattacharyya * Christina Boyles * Gregory Bringman * André Brock * Ron Burkey * Evan Buswell * Sarah Ciston * Eileen Clancy * Tara Conley * Krystal Cooper * Ranjodh Dhaliwal * Anthony Di Franco * Craig Dietrich * Jeremy Douglass * Kevin Driscoll * William Dyson * Brandee Easter * Martin Erwig * Schuyler Esprit * Max Feinstein * Todd Furmanski * Geoffrey Gimse * Erin Glass * Rochelle Gold * Catherine Griffiths * Ben Grosser * Fox Harrell * Sydette Harry * Brendan Howell * Nazua Idris * Jessica Johnson * Waliya Yohanna Joseph * Ted Kafala * Dorothy Kim * Corinna Kirsch * Steve Klabnik * Shelly Knotts * Peter Kudenov * Fidelia Lam * Liz Losh * Thor Magnusson * Jim Malazita * Judy Malloy * Zach Mann * Mark Marino * Lauren McCarthy * Irma McClaurin * Patrick McDonnell * Tara McPherson * Todd Milstein * Nick Montfort * Mark Neal * Safiya Noble * Keith O'Hara * David Ogborn * Allison Parrish * Ali Pearl * Gerol Petruzella * Andrew Pilsch * Samuel Pizelo * Jessica Pressman * Helen Pritchard * Daniel Punday * Kristopher Purzycki * Harvey Quamen * Amit Ray * Margaret Rhee * Lisa Rhody * Scott Richmond * Teddy Roland * Jamal Russell * Anastasia Salter * Mark Sample * Evan Schauer * Ari Schlesinger * Mehdy Sedaghat Payam * Ash Smith * Winnie Soon * Glen Southergill * Mel Stanfill * Samara Hayley Steele * Nikki Stevens * Tonia Sutherland * Miriam Sweeney * Ezra Teboul * Daniel Temkin * Dennis Tenen * Marilyn M. Thomas-Houston * Elizabeth Timbs * Giuseppe Torre * Rebecca Uliasz * Annette Vee * Sneha Veeragoudar * Ashleigh Wade * Kurt James Werner * Jacque Wernimont * Zach Whalen * Roger Whitson * Roger Whitson * Michael Widner * Jody Zellen * Kai Zhang
Coordinated by Mark Marino (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), Catherine Griffiths (USC), Ali Rachel Pearl (USC), and Teddy Roland (UCSB). Sponsored by the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (USC), and the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons (UCSB).

Introductions

edited January 2018 in General

Welcome to the 2018 Critical Code Studies Working Group!

Please reply here with a brief introduction to yourself and your interests in Critical Code Studies.

Some of us are first-time members, others have been attending since 2010. In addition to your general profile, consider briefly sharing new publications or projects, new ideas in progress, or simply new questions.

Once you are done with you introduction:

  • See Forum Tips and Tricks for a guide to posting in general.
  • Read the CCS Bibliography and suggest new entries!
  • Post your Code Critique after reading the Code Critique Guidelines.
  • Attend weekly forums, each with featured discussions (like plenaries).

You are free to repost any of your contributions to the WG elsewhere on the Web, but please do not post the comments or work of others without their permission.

Comments

  • I am Waliya Yohanna Joseph from the University of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria. I had my first degrees in Modern Languages (French) and also Religious Studies. I am new to CCS I will like to suggest Religion & Critical Code Studies. I think religion also influencing coding in programming. I am just a Graduate Assistant in the same Department. I have worked on Calabar Lesbian Cryptic Languages published in October 2017. Please make lectures more explicit as much you can for I am interested in coding as programming language.

  • Hello! I am an anti-racist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. I write about long histories of media and technology – particularly those that count and commemorate — and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing. I'm a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences. This work includes co-Directing HASTAC and ASU’s Human Security Collaboratory. I also run Nexus: A digital research co-op and am a fellow of the Global Security Institute.

    I'm generally interested in how we understand the poetics of code, whether human or machine readable. I tend to think of code as operational/operationalized in a thick context, which also needs its own close reading. I'm excited to be joining everyone again this year.

    Forthcoming awesome things include Numbered Lives (MIT, 2018) and Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in DH, edited with Elizabeth Losh (Minnesota, 2018)

  • Hi, everyone! I'm so excited to be joining you all in this working group!

    I am a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University in the department of Women's and Gender Studies and a predoctoral fellow at University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. My research focuses on how Black girls (middle and high school aged) in the United States use digital media technologies to contribute to race, gender, and sexuality discourses.

    My interest in critical code studies has grown somewhat organically through my research and professional experiences. I have participated in an NEH-sponsored digital humanities workshop, served as a fellow for the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute, and published an article in the Black Code Studies issue of The Black Scholar, edited by Jessica M. Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. Currently, I am one of the co-conveners for the Rutgers Digital Humanities Reading Group. Being in all of these spaces has inspired me to learn/talk more about the implications code has for social justice theorizing, organizing, and pedagogy.

  • Hi all,

    I am an Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University, where I also teach in the Digital Technology and Culture program. I work in media archaeology and Nineteenth-Century Studies, and am very interested in how various technologies mediate our knowledge of that period.

    I've written about William Blake and steampunk in conjunction with the digital humanities (Routledge 2012; 2017). Currently, I'm working on a multigraph with Richard Menke, Andrew Burkett, and Crystal Lake on the intersections of deep temporalities, social histories, and microtemporalites in nineteenth-century media. Additionally, I'm editing a special issue with Helen Burgess on "Critical Making and Executable Kits," and trying to create an automated workflow mimicking the art of William Blake using a CNC-drawing bot.

    The writing process for the multigraph has caused me to focus more explicitly on nineteenth-century female scientists and technologists like Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace - and to look for different models of agency that enmesh human, non-human, and gendered modes of knowledge and code.

  • I'm Nick Montfort, participant in CCSWG since the beginning and co-author & organizer of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1); : GOTO 10, an MIT Press book that started as a CCSWG thread. I'm professor of digital media at MIT. Most recent books: The Truelist (computer-generated poetry) and, in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, The Future. I live in Boston and New York, where I am involved with community gallery Babycastles and the School for Poetic Computation. My site: nickm.com

    In 2017 I got to collaborate with my colleague at MIT Michel DeGraff and bring B.I.C. (Haitian singer, songerwriter, and poet) to campus. In addition to giving a great concert, he developed what we believe is the first work of electronic literature in Haitian Creole, Sentaniz Nimerik, based on a story by Maurice Sixto. Here's a video of Michel explaining the digital poem in Haitian Creole. I've also been trying to facilitate and foster others' work through my two book series, Platform Studies, which I co-edit with Ian Bogost for MIT Press, and Using Electricity, a new computer-generated poetry series from Counterpath.

  • Hi everyone!

    I'm a member of the full-time faculty at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where I teach computer programming to artists and designers. The focus of my arts practice and research is computational creativity, with an emphasis on computer-generated poetry (and other kinds of creative writing).

    Some recent projects, talks, writing:

    As someone who is more comfortable on the arts/design/engineering side of things, I'm only recently gaining my footing in the current scholarship in this area, so I'm humbled to be invited into the community and excited to converse with and learn from you all.

  • I'm an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Texts & Technology Program and Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. My research looks at the relationship between media industries and everyday people--my first book looks at the how media industries relate to fans and my second will examine how everyday notions of creativity and copyright differ from official ones.

    I'm broadly interested in the circulation of power and inequality through technologies. To date I have worked at the interface level (“The Interface as Discourse: The Production of Norms through Web Design.” New Media & Society), and I'm interested to move more into the code level.

  • Hello, everyone!

    In this always excellent CCSWG18 forum -- with a focus on Margaret Hamilton's work in the development of software for the Apollo Guidance Computer and her creation of a software engineering environment -- I'm particularly interested in exploring programming cultures where women have thrived. For example, recent scholarship by women has produced histories of African American mathematicians and programmers at Langley, including Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson (Shetterly, 2016), as well as histories of women mathematicians and computer programmers at JPL, including Susan Finley, Janez Lawson, Helen Ling, Sylvia Lundy, Barbara Paulson, and Victoria Wang (Holt, 2016). These and other sources will be referenced in the CCSWG bibliography.

    In my own electronic literature practice, I've addressed issues of gender and technology in narratives that range from the Silicon Valley chip culture in Uncle Roger; to the space exploration technology cultures in File 1 of Arriving Simultaneously; and later this year, the community networking cultures in File 3 of Arriving Simultaneously.

    In my MIT Press Book, Women Art & Technology , 26 chapters by women explored histories of innovation in new media, including work and scholarship by African American, Pamela Z; Asian Americans, Jaishree Odin, Valerie Soe; Chicana, Martha Burkle Bonecchi; LGBTQ, Jen Hall and Blyth Hazen, Jo Hanson, Pauline Oliveros, Nancy Paterson, Alluquere Rosanne Stone, and others, and women with disabilities, Jen Hall and myself.

    As deep background, I have knowledge of programming cultures of the late 1960's because at the time of the Apollo 11 mission, I was head of a project to create a database for NASA contractor Ball Aerospace's technical document collection, (not easy at that time). And, in the 1990's, I was an artist in residence at Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), where I wrote and programmed a MOO-situated multi-user narrative environment and where PARC researcher Cathy Marshall and I created a collaborative hypertext that explored our experiences in male-dominated programming cultures. And for 11 years, I worked as a core member of the Arts Wire team (a project of the New York Foundation for the Arts) that created a hospitable networking environment for artists and arts organizations.

    As a visiting fellow/faculty, I've taught at Princeton University, the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers Camden University, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

  • edited January 2018

    I'm Martin Erwig, a professor of computer science at Oregon State University. My book Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing provides explanations of computer science concepts for lay people without using programming notation. I believe that a more wide-spread understanding of computing helps us with discussing and judging the growing impact of computing. In addition, it is useful, since we all are using algorithms and computation outside of machines to solve problems every day (think finding pairs of matching socks in your laundry or arranging your shopping list to get through the grocery store more quickly).

    Part of my research is in visual and domain-specific languages and in explainable computing, areas which might be remotely related to CCS, which is otherwise a new field for me. I was invited to participate in this event by Mark Marino.

  • edited January 2018

    Hi everyone,

    My research develops a method for the use of circuit and code analyses in musicological contexts. I use it to draw a component level history of homemade electronic music setups, presenting tinkering and bricolage as an underlying/understudied thread in the field's history and linking it to improvisatory musical practices. I focus on technical design as a type of musical work that has the potential to, paraphrasing David Tudor, "lets components speak for themselves." With this perspective, I propose designs for sound art/performance systems that display the properties of their constituent parts as an opportunity to poetically represent the nested agencies that allowed for music to be "electronic." (redthunderaudio.com)

    I have chapters introducing some of these ideas and related concepts in "Making Things and Drawing Boundaries" which just came out and in last years "Guide to Unconventional Computing in Music."

    I'm interested in balancing the hardware/software critique a bit more in this approach, and this seemed like the right way to engage with code studies. Thanks for having me, and let me know if I forgot anything in this intro!

    All the best,

    Ezra

  • Hi everyone,

    I'm Andrew Pilsch. I'm an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University where I research and teach rhetoric and the digital humanities.

    Broadly, I am interested in rhetorics of fatalism in digital societies. To that end, I recently published a book on transhumanism with University of Minnesota Press, and am currently working on my second project, which more directly intersects with critical code studies.

    That project, tentatively titled Immutability: The World According to Software Bugs, is a media archeology of software bugs that focuses on the growing culture of risk management in computer programming and recent shifts amongst big-data companies to techniques derived from functional programming as a means of managing the complexity of very-large-scale software systems. From this project, I have an article forthcoming in Amodern (any day now) on JavaScript transpilers and the future of machine translation.

    I write code as a means of producstinating ("productive procrastination") from my written work. Most of it is shared on my GitHub page.

  • Hi everyone!

    I am excited to be here for CCSWG18! My recent research has been focused on amateur technical cultures and histories of the net. During CCSWG12, I wrote a related code critique of Steven Dompier's "Altair Music of a Sort" from 1975.

    This time around, I'm working on a project about artificial intelligence and microcomputing from ~1975-1983. In both speculative non-fiction and running code of the period, hobbyists articulated a range of visions for an imminent (or so they believed) A.I. future.

    I'm an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. This semester, I'm teaching a creative programming course for advanced undergrads and I'd love to chat with anyone else bringing #critcode ideas and practices into the classroom.

  • Hi Everyone,

    I'm Dan Punday, a Professor English and Department Head at Mississippi State University. This year I'm also serving as President for the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).

    I work in contemporary literature and culture, although a lot of my work has been focused on digital media in some form or another. I've tried to integrate digital narrative (both popular games and electronic literature) alongside of print texts in my work. I discuss electronic writing in Five Strands of Fictionality (2010) and CD-ROM encyclopedia in Writing at the Limit (2012). In my newest book, Computing as Writing (2015) I look at some of the messy metaphors that equate writing and computing--"writing" code, files as documents, interfaces as a "desktop". I don't work directly in programming, but rather I'm more interested in models from computing work their way through culture more broadly--especially in that part of culture we think of as literary. I see writing and programming as in dialog with each other.

    I'm glad to be included here, and hope I can contribute.

  • I'm Corinna Kirsch. I'm a PhD Candidate in Art History and Media Studies at Stony Brook University. My dissertation is on the artist Les Levine and the emergent relationship between technology and Earth in conceptual art practice.

    This is my first year to take part in the CCS Working Group. I'm thrilled to be part of this group: some of you I know personally already, some of you I know from around the Internet, and some of you I only know from your writing. I'm a designated respondent for the Gender and Programming Cultures thread; you'll see a lot of me there. As a former blogger, I'm thrilled about the CCS Working Group format.

    From a research perspective, my focus on programming concerns artists working with code, often with now-historical code, and working with systems, such as time-sharing, that have similarly passed out of contemporary computing realities and imaginaries.

    My own coding skills are fairly weak. I'm working on that, though...

  • Hi all,

    I'm John Bell, an artist and coder in ice-encrusted Hanover, NH. I'm a lead dev focusing on digital humanities projects with Research Computing at Dartmouth and asst. prof. of digital curation at the University of Maine's graduate program.

    My training is in art, with a particular focus on new media and intermedia. My projects are intentionally all over the place, from contributing to Scalar several years ago to writing an accidentally suicidal bot that got a bit too depressed over the state of discourse on the Internet. I'm also another of the 10 Print co-authors and am working on a new book looking at how creativity works (or doesn't) in collaborations between artists and how those methods are reflected in algorithmic creativity.

  • Hello Everyone,

    I’m Geoff Gimse, a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. In general, my research focuses on digital rhetoric, hardware and software infrastructures, and the publics that create and use them. My current research examines the socio-political influences on the development practices of Internet software developers from the early-to-mid 1990s and how those influences changed as network technology rapidly evolved to meet growing interest and demand. I am particularly interested in how different elements of the rhetorics that informed these development practices were encoded into the software and then expressed or resisted in broader online cultures.

    This is my first time as part of the CCWSG forum. I am really looking forward to spending the next few weeks exploring and learning with everyone here.

  • Hi everyone!

    I’m Nikki Stevens, a first-year PhD student at Arizona State University, where I have the great fortune of working with Jacque Wernimont. My research interests are evolving, but always seem to involve on open source communities, software engineering ethics, and the epistemology of technical choices. This is my first year joining CCSWG, though I’ve been a software engineer for a long time (mostly PHP and Drupal, but also some Ruby and Python). I’m excited to to think about code from new perspectives and learn from everyone here.

  • edited January 2018

    Welcome to the CCS Working Group thinking through gender and programming culture.

  • edited January 2018

    I'm Liz Losh, a member of the FemTechNet collective and co-director of the Equality Lab at William and Mary. I am excited to be joining Judy Malloy and Jacque Wernimont in co-facilitating what is already a lively discussion. My most recent essay on the topic of gender and programming culture will be out soon in First Monday. Look for an article about why infrastructural planner Mina Rees should be seen as just as important as Vannever Bush and why programming shouldn't always dominate the discussion.

  • Hey all!

    I'm Theo Ellin Ballew, and I make digital language art and prose poetry. I'm also the founder and director of the 11-month-old ORAL (oral.pub/), which publishes sonnet-sized websites that act as poetry from Mexico/the U.S., along with translations of those websites into/from English/Spanish. I received by B.A. in Literature (focusing on feminist experimental fiction and translation) from Yale, along with the Alvin B. Kernan Prize for the Best Senior Essay in the Literature Major, in 2015. I've gone home to over a dozen cities in the U.S., and currently live in Mexico City.

    I hope to do graduate work in digital language art in the near future. I am mostly interested in exploring how authorial privilege/origins -- situational, bodily -- are obscured or exposed in online creative work. I am also broadly interested in what it means to work creatively in a new medium.

    This is the first year I'm participating in the CSS Working Group, and I'm hugely looking forward!

  • edited January 2018

    Hi everyone!

    I’m Miriam Sweeney, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama in the School of Library and Information Studies. This is my first time participating in the CCSWG, and I’m looking forward to conversations with all of you fine folks.

    My research broadly interrogates intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in the design, use, and meaning of digital technologies. Among other things, I research anthropomorphized design, (“The Intersectional Interface” in The Intersectional Internet) including virtual agent technologies and search engine interfaces (“The Ms. Dewey ‘experience’: Technoculture, gender, and race” in Digital Sociologies).

    I have several current research projects that this group might be interested in, including: race, gender and sexuality as design features of Alexa and Siri; cultural analysis of encoding race in Unicode; explorations of user discourse around “diverse” emoji sets; and several case studies of virtual agent interfaces that are designed as Latinas.

    My research often incorporates interface analysis techniques that consider platform and code issues. I’d love to deepen some of these aspects of my projects, so I’m looking forward to groups discussions to explore this in the next few weeks!

  • Hello all,

    I'm Rebecca Uliasz. I am a PhD candidate in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures (CMAC) at Duke. I conduct mutli-disciplinary research in perception in time-based media, analog computation and artificial intelligence. I also engage in an artistic practice that incorporates experimental system and instrument building, audio/visual electronic noise performance and multi-media installation. I have a background in creative coding, mainly in performative and artist-oriented programs like Max/MSP and Processing. I also work with microcontrollers.

    I actively perform in audio-visual and expanded cinema DIY groups in NYC, and am very interested in the intersections of DIY culture, experimental practice/performance, and hardware and software studies. I received my MFA from SUNY Stony Brook University, and will return to NYC this summer to work at the electronic artist supporting non-profit, Harvestworks.

    This is my first year as part of the CSS Working Group, and I am thrilled to take part!

  • Hi all,

    I'm excited to join conversations with so many people whose work I admire! I'm Mike Widner and I work for the Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages as an Academic Technology Specialist. I'm the Technology Director for the Poetic Media Lab and for the Modernist Archive Publishing Project. I'm also the technical lead for and a contributor to the Global Medieval Sourcebook. All three of these are part of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

    Along with being an active developer and researcher, I also teach courses on literature, digital humanities, and critical code studies. Last spring quarter, I taught a course called "Programming and Poetry" that included readings from Mark Marino's CCS book, 10PRINT (code I remember playing with on my own C-64 as a boy), and several other similar texts. Next quarter, I'll be teaching "Literature and Technology", an introduction to DH that will include critical approaches to metadata, databases, and code, among other topics in the syllabus.

    My research has included work on embodied cognition, identity formation, constructions of male/female bodies in medieval literature, antisemitism in late medieval England, and several other topics that, while having nothing to do with computers, certainly touch on some of the gender and identity issues that I find important in critical code studies.

    Again, I'm really looking forward to our conversations!

  • Hi, I’m Gregory Bringman, an independent scholar and professional developer with interests in critical code studies, the history and philosophy of science, French philosophy, and digital encyclopedism. I am trained as an artist, with a BFA in new media and an MFA in experimental media. My work has ranged from film to critical theory, translation, and conceptual art.

    I’ve previously been a participant in CCSWGs in 2010 and 2016, and am looking forward to this year’s discussions. In previous code critiques, I’ve looked at the connection of non-human desire to OOP and also the ways in which big-O notation has lost its historical roots in the philosophy of mathematics to become a seemingly transparent measure of computational efficiency.

    Recent work combines immersion in French as a translator and writer with critical code studies topics in a larger project that emphasizes the renewed importance of the critical dictionary in the age of Wikipedia.

    In addition, my interests as a software developer are in TDD, domain-specific languages, gesture notation / modeling, and theorizing software process.

  • Hello Eveyone
    My name is William Dyson and I'am the founder of: Douglass https://douglass.io and the "Beloved Community License" https://douglass.io/the-bcl

    My background is in Political Philosophy, with a focus on "The Black Radical Tradition" .

    At the age of 5, I began a meditative practice. At the age of 11 my family spun into poverty; the meditation practice helped me to get through each day, support, my family, and experience the understanding that I was not alone in the struggle.

    I have devoted my adult life to developing technology that will disrupt computing as we know it, while at the same time empowering communities in struggle to create new economic and political spaces.

  • edited January 2018

    Hi, I am Winnie Soon, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University, teaching Aesthetic Programming and Digital Culture.

    I am interested in the notion of computational thinking, in which I consider computational practice (including programming - read/write/execute code) as a mode of (cultural) inquiry to understand/reveal, and think with, the digital culture - a condition that we are highly engaged with, and surrounded by, software and networked systems. (Slightly different from creative coding and computer science ways of programming)

    My latest work titled Vocable Code is a piece of software art, codework, digital poetry and web art that examines the notion of queerness in computer coding. See http://siusoon.net/?p=410 and https://github.com/siusoon/VocableCode

    I am glad to be part of the CCSWG this year, and look forward to our conversations.

  • Hi all, I'm Anastasia Salter, an assistant prof of digital media at the University of Central Florida where I also teach in the Texts & Tech PhD program.

    My interest is primarily in the platforms and spaces where groups traditionally marginalized in tech / STEM are telling stories of all kinds, particularly through playable media / hypertext / interactive fiction / etc. Currently I'm researching Twine and the communities of sharing and computational creativity that have developed around it. I see Twine as one of the closest things we have yet to a queer + feminist platform for making digital narrative.

    Most of my previous research / book info is online here: http://anastasiasalter.net/

  • I am Keith O'Hara (first time caller). I direct the computer science program at Bard College (NY, USA). I am also a founding member of our Experimental Humanities concentration and center. I value interdisciplinary work, having collaborated with a variety of scholars (literature, dance, film & electronic arts, studio art), and look forward to more of it. I believe liberal arts colleges are uniquely placed to bridge the many digital divides.

    My research interests are in CS education, robotics and interactive computing (e.g., accessible robotics, distributed robot systems, projector-camera systems). I particularly love teaching programming to arts & humanities students. I have designed and taught a variety of introductory CS courses (from robots, to processing, to drones, to data viz, to games) at our primary campus in Annandale and through the Bard Prison Initiative.

    For the last three years, I have led an initiative where all first-year students (~500) explore 'code as language' as part of our Language and Thinking (L&T) program. L&T is a three-week writing intensive introduction to the liberal arts that takes place in August. The most recent incarnation invited students to write interactive essays with Twine.

  • Hello! My name is Kristopher Purzycki, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee where I also serve as the intern in our Digital Humanities Lab. My dissertation project is a look at how we acquire a sense of place within computer games and digital environments. Although I had initially wanted to integrate CCS into this project, I couldn't manage to fit it all in and so it moves to the top of the "For After Graduation" pile.

    I've been an amateur programmer since being exposed to BASIC in grade school. I continued dabbling in C and VB in the early 2000s but have had little chance to make coding a part of my discipline. My background in graphic design, however, has allowed me to somewhat keep up with HTML. Despite this shortcoming (or maybe because of this), I still get the same youthful sense of wonder whenever I engage with computer programming.

    Looking forward to working with everyone!

  • Greetings all! I'm Gerol Petruzella. PhD in Philosophy, MA in Classics, work at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in academic technology. I teach courses from Hellenistic Philosophy to Web Development to online teaching certification (the "small college, many hats" syndrome); published a volume in ancient philosophy (Durable Goods, 2013); do work in gamification (see Bell, Game On!) and digital humanities generally; and do my best to stay involved in interesting conversations.

  • edited January 2018

    Hi everyone,

    Thrilled to be part of my first CCSWG! I’m Tonia Sutherland and I’m an assistant professor of archival studies and digital culture at the University of Alabama. My research focuses on social studies of information systems and services, which for me means I conduct interdisciplinary research at the intersections of technology and culture, engaging broad questions about design, representation, and equitable access. I write, speak, chirp, and teach about race and gender (and death and dying) in digital spaces; (often-problematic) national infrastructures; data science and data silence(s); and encoded archival standards—among other things.

    I’ve worked on a couple of big DH projects and I’m a member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. I’m really looking forward to our week on #BlackCodeStudies. I’m excited to talk with all of you about all of the things, but I’ll be starting a thread on the programming and algorithmic assumptions that go into the design of women’s safety apps (e.g. bSafe, Watch Over Me, Scream Alarm). I’ve recently begun working on a project that interrogates the ways in which the assumptions encoded into these apps do not address the needs of—and may, in fact, be dangerous for—Black women/femmes.

    I also want to talk about how, even for CCSWG18, I had to choose between the week on race and the week on gender to propose a discussion on Black women/femmes and safety.

    Looking forward to our conversations!

  • edited January 2018

    My name is Krystal Cooper, creative technologist and artist. I'm a recent graduate of the iSchool at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I’m completing a post graduate certificate in GIS from UND. I am currently an independent DH researcher focusing on cultural heritage analytics , African-American DH projects and spatial humanities. When I’m not doing that I am developing Immersive Reality Experiences and checking out potential PhD programs.

    All of the topics sound fascinating and I'm looking forward to the discussions. Some ideas I've been brainstorming about include cultural approaches/methods to creating algorithms and data structures.

  • Welcome everyone! I am Jeremy Douglass, an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara, where I now serve as the faculty director of our new Digital Arts & Humanities Commons. I am one of the organizers of the Critical Code Studies Working Group -- please contact me on the forum or by email if there is any way that I can help.

    My relevant research interests are in CCS, software studies, cultural analytics, and information visualization. I'm interested in tracing the transition of interactive narrative from print to digital forms, particularly in the context of elit and game studies, and currently working on two projects on narrative encoding and visualization -- Pathpattern for graphing interactive page space, and Panelcode for diagramming page composition (as in comics and graphic novels).

    Background: A recent major project on close reading electronic literature was as a collaborating author (with Jessica Pressman and Mark Marino) on the book Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} l(2015). In critical code studies specifically, my first code "close reading" was of Andrew Plotkin's Shade -- that piece ("Enlightening Interactive Fiction") appeared as a chapter in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan's First Person (2006). I helped organize the first Software Studies conference in 2007, and at Digital Humanities 2009 I took a look at how code criticism might apply to non-traditional programming paradigms ("What Counts as Code to Criticize?"); at the CCS Working Group in 2010 I led a week discussion on how code circulates "in the wild" in public, non-programming forums ("Week 2: Reading Reading Code"); at USC's 2010 CCS Conference I looked at the history of code comments in the computer science literature ("Comments on Comments in Code."). At CCS 2012 I was one of the participants in the week on "Play" -- and I'm one of the authors of the book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a sustained 10-author reading of a single line of source code (MIT Press 2012). In 2014 I helped present the ACLS Workbench collaborative (code) commenting environment modification for the Scalar platform. And I have joined my colleague Mark Marino in organizing this workshop every two years for a decade!

    CCS has been a very rewarding community for me to learn from and grow in, and I am excited to meet new people and have new conversations this year.

  • Hello all, my name is Jamal Russell, and I'm a PhD student in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of English, where I'm also serving as the research assistant for the department's Transcriptions Center (and have had the pleasure of working with both Jeremy Douglass and Teddy Roland on various projects during my time here). I'm currently putting together a dissertation on how avant-garde and digital poetic practices constitute a method of critically investigating the relationship between interface design and habits of media use. (hopefully CCS will play a part in this dissertation, but that remains to be seen). More generally, I am interested in how different types of interfaces, through their implementation and use, mediate ideological precepts relating to computation's place in society at large.

    I am a CCSWG first-timer, and I am excited to both participate in the working group and learn from all of my fellow participants!

  • Hello, everyone
    A pleasure to meet you, and begin our work together. My name is Glen Southergill, and I am a teacher-scholar of rhetorics affiliated with Montana Tech as an Assistant Professor of Professional and Technical Communication. My work in digital media and software studies has historically been more on the human-computer interaction and interface side. Only recently, with a book chapter for a scholarly collection as my next project, have I started touching critical code studies as a point of intervention in environmental communications. In short, I hope to learn with you in the coming weeks as I begin this next project!

  • Hi all,

    I am Evan Buswell, and I wear many hats, but I don't wear that many out in public. I'm trying to change that a little lately. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, where I'm writing a dissertation that combines a Marxist history of economics and ideology with a history of code. (Basically, the argument is that economic developments invariably give rise to a certain kind of structured, ritualistic relationship -- the oath in feudalism, credit in capitalism -- that via its ideological content appears first in algebraic language, then in code.) I've been a programmer for 25 years or so now, and have been with the critcode train since 2008. I used to work in the industry, but lately the programming has been showing up in some critical coding projects (which I'll talk about next week!), in some audio synthesis projects (Sonic Maths), and in my projects with the UC Davis ModLab (primarily Play the Knave). Lately, I've also been dabbling in music (Next Expanse), and have been learning analog electronics in order to design some Eurorack (synthesizer) modules (TBA!).

    Either all of these things are related, or they are not.

    I'm excited to be involved with all the discussions, and excited to be facilitating the week 2 discussion with John Bell and Margaret Rhee!

  • Hi all,

    I'm Fidelia Lam, and I'm a PhD student in the Media Arts + Practice program at the University of Southern California. I'm an experimental artist and researcher thinking about everyday performance and how our interactions are mediated through/by/with technology. I have a creative coding background and work mostly in the realm of interactive installation and live performance using TD, Max, Processing, Arduino, etc.

    Really interested in how assumptions and biases inform the code that is written and how that in turn influences and controls our perception of the world. This is my first CCSWG, and I'm excited to dialogue and learn from you all!

  • Good morning and hello everyone!

    It has been nice to read all these introductions, and I'm looking forward to the discussion. I'm an artist-researcher at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Canada, where I direct the Cybernetic Orchestra (a long-running, live coding laptop orchestra) and the Networked Imagination Laboratory (a well-equipped space devoted to live coding and network music). I teach in our undergraduate program in Multimedia, our MA program in Communication and New Media, and our PhD program in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies.

    I chaired the second International Conference on Live Coding in 2016, and remain on the steering committee for subsequent events (next one is in Madrid at Medialab Prado - should be a call fairly soon!). Critical code studies relates to my work in lots of ways, but I would say that I am most interested in helping to form better connections between it and the "field" of live coding. One of my "secret agendas" around live coding is to work to unsettle a latent "hacker ethic" that is often just under the surface of things, while continuing to hack away (and so, from a position of some complicity). I've been reading and re-reading Derrida and Spivak lately and that is informing my thinking about these things as well.

    Talk soon,
    David

  • I am new to CCS but I am getting the idea

  • Hi All!

    I'm Ari. I'm a PhD student at Georgia Tech invested in developing technology that builds just values into the architecture and the interface. Recently I've published about intersectionality and Human-Computer Interaction, and I have a paper forthcoming about race and chatbots.

    My program is in Human-Centered Computing, where I have been working mostly within Human-Computer Interaction. I'm excited to be back at CCSWG. I really enjoyed leading a discussion on Gender and Feminist Code in 2014.

    A little late to the intro game, and currently with very accurate profile picture that does not want to change. Nevertheless, excited to chat with you all!

  • Hi, everyone!

    I am the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Trinity College, which is a brand new position this year. In this role, I am developing DH's presence on campus by scaling up our support for faculty research and pedagogy, launching a DH certificate program, and expanding our participation in the global DH community.

    My research spans a wide range of topics, largely focused in digital humanities, environmental humanities, critical race and gender theory, and surveillance. My most recent projects include Hurricane Memorial and Makers by Mail.

    I am relatively new to CCS, but was excited get a introduction to it at last year's Feminist DH course at DHSI (thanks, @lizlosh and Jessica Marie Johnson!). I am looking forward to learning more in the weeks ahead.

  • Hello! I am an artist-researcher and the current Director for Art and Technology in the Culture, Art and Technology program at UCSD. My current work is in speculative design, interspecies technologies and post-anthropocene entanglements. I recently co-wrote and directed a six part sci-fi comedy series which uses San Diego (Biotech Beach) as a character to think about biotechnology and the near future of water.

    I am brand new to CCS and very excited to be here.

  • Hi all—I'm an experimental writer and Annenberg Fellow in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California. My work includes creative-critical digital projects such as a chatbot that tries to explain feminism to trolls on Reddit, an interactive poem of the quantified self, and a web browser that shares the reading behavior of its neighboring users'. Overall I'm interested in how digital experiences shift intersubjectivity and how language can shift to express this. I'm new to the working group but excited to see lots of familiar faces!

  • edited January 2018

    Hi all! My name is Tara L. Conley and I'm brand new to CCS. Happy to be here (thank you Jessica Johnson!). I'm currently the Research Director at Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, The New School, and New York University (lots of adjuncting!). I recently published an article on Decoding black feminist hashtags as becoming in The Black Scholar. I have a few more articles coming out on transmedia and (what I call) transdata storytelling. In a nutshell, I'm an ethnographer and social media scholar with a central focus on race, gender, youth and movement cultures. You can find more of my work and projects at taralconley.org. I look forward to learning from everyone!

  • Hello all, I am Teddy Roland, and am a Ph.D. student in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am currently the Graduate Research Assistant at the UCSB Digital Arts and Humanities Commons, where I work with @jeremydouglass, and I regularly collaborate with @JamalSRussell on digital projects.

    My research interests broadly fall under the umbrella of the Digital Humanities, and in particular, I attend to the productive disciplinary collisions between the Humanities and Data Science. I am just arriving to Critical Code Studies, myself, as a way to reflect and intervene on the everyday practices of data scientific research. I am very excited to learn from everyone here!

    Additionally, I am one of the co-organizers of CCSWG18. Welcome! If you have any issues with your account on this site, please feel free to get in touch by DM or email.

  • My name is Angela Ajimase from the University of Calabar,Nigeria. I am a lecturer in Carbbean literature in French and Iteach other courses too.I am also working as Deputy Director in the Directorate of Research and Q

  • Hello, I am Sayan Bhattacharyya, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. I am interested in how computational analysis of text can help humanists in the work of interpretation. I did my PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

  • Hi all.

    I'm a Lecturer in Audio (Americans, that's sort of like an assistant professor...) at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. My main research focuses on expanding a mathematical formalism called Wave Digital Filters that I use to make digital models of vintage audio circuitry. I also work on the history of music technology, focusing on the how circuit theory and applications developed in commercial, DIY, and hobbyist practice. Especially in analog drum machine circuitry. But especially in the Roland TR-808 bass drum. Maybe that should be called "Critical Circuit Studies?"

    I have a smattering of experience with code especially Matlab, C++, C, LaTeX, HTML, CSS, Python, Max/MSP, Processing, Grace/CLM, ChucK, etc. Along with Dr. Melissa Kagen (Lecturer in Digital Media and Gaming, Bangor University), I co-founded a code poetry slam during my PhD at Stanford University (Mike and Ben, hi). I read 10 PRINT with great interest and I'm interested in how a critical approach to analog circuitry could draw inspiration from CCS.

  • Hello everyone. I'm a Doctoral Candidate in Communications, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NCSU. I came to my program with extensive experience as a consultant, programmer analyst, and software engineer, having started working in industry in 2001. I've written a bit of everything and a lot of C, C++, and C#.

    My research focuses on problematics and historical problematology, and how different disciplines, such as Computer Science and various managerial sciences, have shaped the practices of software engineering, which has developed its own approaches to problems and solutions. I principally employ a Deleuzian perspective in my work, because his ontological emphasis is particularly suited to how software is made both historically, and in contemporary terms (i.e., with DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices).

  • Hi everyone! I'm a doctoral candidate in composition and rhetoric at UW-Madison. My dissertation examines esoteric and weird programming languages through feminist and queer theory. This is my first year with the CCS working group, but 2016's conversations on C+= and feminist programming really hooked me on CCS. Excited to meet you all!

  • Hi! I'm Ali Rachel Pearl and I a PhD candidate in English at USC with a grad certificate in USC's Media Arts + Practice program. My work is focused on how identity intersects with digital culture. More specifically, I write about archives, surveillance, and digital communities. I'm also a creative writer who doesn't see creative writing and scholarship as mutually exclusive practices, so I work across genres in an attempt to reach a wider audience. I'm interested in anti-racist, decolonial, and feminist approaches to reading, writing, pedagogy, and digital technologies.

  • Hi everyone. I'm Catherine Griffiths and I'm a PhD student in Media Arts at USC. My work is looking at how to visualize algorithms, in the context of the ethics in algorithms debate. This is my first CCS working group. I'm also a co-organizer of the CCSWG2018, so feel free to reach out for any support you might need.

  • Hello All ,

    My name is Sydette Harry . I am currently Editor, Network for Mozilla. My personal work is grounded in how we open the observations and historical context of coding data and practice to be more grounded in lived experience and what infrastructure does to affect that. This is my first CCSWG and I'm excited !

  • Hi everyone,

    Ny name is Samuel Pizelo, and I'm a PhD student in English Literature at UC Davis, specializing in Science and Technology Studies and Media/Game Studies. I have been working with using computational tools to recontextualize historiography (primarily digital archives and databases). I am also interested in procedural rhetoric and post-humanist theory as it relates to human/technology interfacing. In both of these projects, I have been using LDA topic modeling to analyze bodies of texts, and I am interesting in critically evaluating the ramifications of this increasingly popular tool. This is my first CCSWG, and I am looking forward to the experience.

  • Hello all,
    My name is Evan Schauer. I'm a scientist at a biopharmaceutical startup company, working on targeted antimicrobial medicine.
    In my free time, I have extensively studied game design and theory and designed a live action roleplaying game with novel interaction mechanics. I'm interested in code as it relates to game design and the scientific method.

  • Howdy code critters,
    My name is Samara Hayley Steele and I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University. I write for the anarchist press, and am a theorist and practitioner of larp (live action role-play). I'm very much excited about analog RPGs (larp and tabletop roleplaying games), and I think that analog game literacy just might save the work.
    Check.

  • Hi, all,

    So great to see you all here. Over ten years ago, I wrote an essay calling for something that I called Critical Code Studies. Now, 5 working groups and over a decade later, I'm so grateful to all of you who have been exploring this topic with me in the Working Groups, at HASTAC, and as affiliates of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab, which I direct at the University of Southern California. When I'm not doing this, I direct communications for the Electronic Literature Organization, netprov with Rob Wittig, and write interactive stories with friends and especially my kids!

  • Hello everyone,
    I joined in (very) late, there were some technical difficulties.
    My name is Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, and I am pursuing my PhD in English at UC Davis with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. Before my California days, I earned an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Indore and studies English at the University of Chicago. My research interests include contemporary art and literature, science and technology studies, critical media theory, videogame studies, code studies, and art history. My dissertation looks at the technics of algorithmic production and representation throughout the history of computing, with a particular focus on rendering as it is manifested in the culture and literature of late 20th century. And it has a giant critical code studies component!
    I am excited to be here! :)

  • edited February 2018

    Coming in late but glad to be here. I'm Annette Vee and I've been involved in CCS for quite a few years and ran a thread a few years ago on literacy and coding. I'm an Asst Prof of English at University of Pittsburgh and the author of Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (MIT Press, 2017), which refers to critical code studies. I'm interested in coding and its social and historical relationship to writing. I'm also interested in coding cultures, and legal treatments of code (which I've written about for Computational Culture).

  • Hi everyone! Honored to be in this working group with all of you! My short bio: Paisley M. Benaza, MBA is a global brand strategist, Ph.D. student, and popular culture thought leader for social justice, diversity, and inclusion of women of color in the business of entertainment, media, and sports. I'm a first year PhD student at Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU...so if anyone is ever visiting Downtown PHX then I'm your tour guide! I'll be giving presentations at BEA Vegas 2018, AEJMC Midwinter 2018 at OU and AEJMC 2018 in DC. Degree info: BA from USC, MBA from Georgetown. More info here: https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/3135384

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