https://criticalcodestudies.com/

I hope this site along with the HaCCS lab site will serve as hubs for CCS activities, especially in the years between our biennial working groups.

Thanks one and all!

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.

Before we begin code critiques, we have to find the bodies of code worth investigating. Over the past ten years, we’ve looked at a wide range of code. For example,

• The Apollo moon lander
• ADVENTURE
• FLOW-MATIC, a forerunner to COBOL
• The Transborder Immigrant Tool

It turns out one of the most productive intellectual contributions you can make to critical code studies is to identify a body of code worth considering. That activity, of identifying an object worth analyzing, launches the investigation and incites exploration.

Why is this activity so important? Primarily because to call out a body of code as worthy of exploration is to say this artifact has significance. While CCS contends that all code has significance beyond what it does, for a scholar to turn a spotlight on a piece of code is like choosing a book for a book club or perhaps more significantly to present a work on on display in a museum. In the same way the Code Critiques do, that act of curation gives the rest of us a chance to walk around and consider various aspects -- and we can help find snippets worth exploring further.

Let us begin this thread with a call for codebases -- a call for you to identify programs or entire pieces of software worth exploring. These could be in repositories or merely a single file -- as long as the code is publically available for collective exploration.

So we put out the call to you? What codebases do you want to identify?

Calls for Proposals
Print Guidelines

Digital Humanities Quarterly Special Issue on Minimal Computing
Guest editors: Alex Gil (Columbia University Libraries) and Roopika Risam (Salem State University)

Abstracts due January 30, 2020

Special Issue Description

This special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly will bring together essays and case studies on the promises and limitations of minimal computing from historical, practical, and theoretical perspectives, as well as within the context of specific research projects and their environments.

Minimal computing can be defined as any form of digital or computational praxis done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, agency or other factors. Within the context of digital humanities scholarship, minimal computing refers to such computing practices used for teaching, research, and the construction and maintenance of a hybrid -- digital and analog -- scholarly and cultural record.

Broadly construed, our scope is not limited to digital scholarship within the confines of universities and thus includes work undertaken in galleries, archives (institution and community-based), and libraries, as well as in collaboration with communities. In this issue, we strive for equity in gender and particularly encourage submission by women and gender minorities. We further actively seek to include at least one contribution from each of the following geographical areas: Latin America, Africa, and Asia. We are able to accept submissions in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Suggested Topics
Topics can include but are not limited to:

• Minimal hardware: aged machines, USBs, arduinos, simple circuits, etc.
• Minimal computation: simple scripts, bash, tranductions, etc.
• Static site generation
• Teaching fundamentals of computing tied to subjects in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences
• Forms of making-do in relation to computation: jugaad, hacktivism, DIY
• Technological disobedience, i.e. using technologies in a way they were not intended
• Marginal forms of knowledge and memory production involving computation
• A critique of minimal or minimalist approaches undertaken by choice, rather than by necessity
• Genealogies of minimalist forms of computation
• Case studies on projects that address a multiplicity of costs (environment, bandwidth, access, maintenance, etc) and needs (publishing, remembrance, resistance, etc) with an overall reduction in complexity
• Implications of minimal computing practices for universities, libraries and archives.

Submission Formats

The special issue will consist of two sections: The first section will be reserved for scholarly arguments grounded in history or well argued theoretical work on minimal computing, and the second section will include case studies in the form of specific projects or deep descriptions of environments that pose particular challenges or constraints for digital scholarship and strategic responses to them that incorporate minimal computing practices.

In the first section, we welcome historical perspectives on minimal computing that place contemporary practices in dialogue with multiple documented genealogies; theoretical or strategic pieces that examine socio-technical implications of these practices at scale today; and critical or skeptical voices who are familiar with the implications of minimal computing and the informal discussions and practices that have taken place in the recent past.

For the second section we welcome deep descriptions of projects and environments that include, extend, and complicate minimal computing practices, prompting meditations on difference and imperfect similarity between multiple projects or environments. These case studies should help mainstream audiences understand the granular thinking behind design decisions that respond to specific constraints and challenges.

Submission Details

We ask that you send your abstracts (max. 500 words) to rrisam@salemstate.edu and agil@columbia.edu by January 30, 2020 for a first round of review. Early inquiries are encouraged. We will notify all submitters of the status of their submission in late February. If you are invited to submit a full-length article (~4,000-8,000 words) or a case study (~2500 words), we ask that they be submitted by June 30, 2020.

Here are a few tips to help you create great discussions:

This forum has a text editor that uses markdown. Go here for a guide to formatting in markdown.

Proofread. Spelling mistakes, typos, and bad grammar will distract readers from the point you’re trying to make. Vanilla automatically saves drafts as you type. If you’re writing a long post, save it as a draft and come back to it after a few minutes or as long as it takes your brain to forget what you had written.

Use minimal formatting. Overly formatted posts can also distract from the message and it encourages others to do likewise and you end up with a hard to read thread.

Put your post in the right category. The right category can be the one that has a relevant category name or it can be a category where this kind of post is often made.

Use tags. Tags are helpful for others to find keyword related posts. It also helps the site admins get a sense for what topics are popular.

Add an image. Images add visual interest and make your post look great when shared to social networks. You can embed an image using the button bar or you can upload one from your desktop or phone.

Mention others. Credit other members if you are building off their previous comments or if you want to draw them into the discussion. Put the @ before a username to mention someone.

Make the discussion title or question as descriptive as possible. A good discussion title is a short preview of your post and is what gets people to click and read. A well written title is also going to help search engines better index your post which will bring more people into the discussion. For example, instead of ‘Won’t Connect,’ try ‘Help, I’m having problems getting my Acme modem into bridge mode.’

Additionally, you can format any code examples as such by using the "code" option under the paragraph symbol on the editor's toolbar. You'll find other options under that menu for formatting quoted text and marking "spoiler" content.

As a best practice in threaded discussions, begin your replies with quoted text from the post to which you're responding. That will keep conversations clear. Also, link to other discussion and code critique threads whenever appropriate.

Take ownership. Most important of all, take ownership of the discussions that you have created. Respond to comments promptly and thoughtfully. Thank others for commenting on your discussion and help with moderation if things get heated.

For the first time in a CCSWG, you can see the discussions and code critiques from the previous forums in this forum. However, you cannot continue those discussions on those threads.

We hope you enjoy this online working group!

Policies for Guests

The Critical Code Studies Working Group welcomes guests from a diverse community. In order to foster a safe and productive environment for discussion, we offer the following guidelines:

• Be respectful.
• Be welcoming
• Cite sources when possible.

This is a community space, like a community garden. Our goal is to grow ideas together. Please, treat it with care.

Some guidelines:

• Keep your posts relevant to the forum category.
• Please be respectful of others and don’t sweat the small stuff.
• Please do not post any personal information or photos that you wouldn’t want to be seen by the public.
• Do not post hateful or illegal content. Do not post copyrighted material without proper attribution.
• SPAM will not be tolerated.
• Use private messages to chat with moderators or other members in private.

Publication Agreement:

The forum is a public space. Anyone with access to the Internet can read what is posted. To further spread this content, we intend to republish excerpts from the Main threads. By posting in those main threads, you give us permission to republish content on that thread in collections of the CCSWG Main thread discussions.

Class Guidelines:

We welcome faculty who wish to bring their undergraduate students to the working group. However, as the conversation threads are meant to be publication-worthy, we would ask that you limit undergraduates to one post on each of the weekly threads. We are happy to set up separate threads for classes, but we do not want the main weekly discussions to become classroom posting boards. That said, we are so happy to have you here.