a journal of software studies
Welcome to the eighth issue of Computational Culture! This issue, like many other things, has been somewhat hindered by the global pandemic and the inspiration this gave to the latent restructuring ambitions of some university managers. Given that we are currently ‘living with’ rather than fully vaccinatable against either of these problems, we are delighted …
Introduction The once chaotic web of the 1990s has, since 2000, increasingly been converted into centralized platforms that either serve as gated communities with networks of ‘friends’ or commercial services that serve music, TV, videos, books, search results and software while containing and profiling the user. Consuming culture and contributing content means producing data in …
Continue reading “The User as a Character, Narratives of Datafied Platforms”
Introduction Jon Corbett is an artist programmer of Métis (Cree+Saulteaux+English) heritage who has taken on the challenge of adapting and expressing elements of his cultural heritage and indigenous Cree language in computer code. Exploring what he and others have called “indigenous programming” practices (Corbett, Laiti, Lewis, and Temkin 2020),1 Corbett has been developing software in …
The Project This book is an account of the practice of machine learning – that is, the project of configuring software, by means of a learning process, so that it can learn from data and, as a consequence, be able to deal with further data in an intelligent way. However, some of these terms – …
Continue reading “Towards an Archaeology of Machine Learning?”
The notion of execution and its practices, which gave birth to this book, were first examined by a collective of artists, thinkers and researchers calling themselves “Critical Software Thing” in two workshops in Aarhus, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden between 2015 – 2016.1 With these discussions, the group, interested in thinking things and objects from the …
Introduction Russia has historically led scientific invention, however, it has consistently failed to commercialise and implement it. This claim, initially voiced by historian of science Loren Graham, discussing the sphere of innovation and business, is subjected to detailed scrutiny in From Russia with Code. A collection of essays edited by Science and Technology scholars Mario …
Continue reading “Learning from Russia’s hi-tech Soviet heritage. Review: From Russia with Code”
Introduction Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter1 is a recent addition to a growing literature on computing and identity. The book asks us to confront an awkward truth: How a person is racially marked can help to account for how that person is likely to …
Annette Vee’s Coding Literacy is a very timely reflection on current movements and campaigns aimed at broadening access to computer programming. The book’s argument is that computer programming (or coding) can be productively viewed as a form of literacy, and that, in turn, the growing importance of coding is transforming what it means to be …
The authors of Spotify Teardown have written an important book. The first of what may soon become a cottage industry of texts about individual streaming services, Spotify Teardown shows what a multidisciplinary approach toward understanding Spotify can tell us about what drives the development of streaming services, and how they are changing media culture. Spotify …
Continue reading “Thinking Culture in the Age of Global Finance: A review of Spotify Teardown“
The initial release of the Atari ST musical sequencing program Cubase by the German software company Steinberg in April 1989 marks a significant moment not only for computer music but the development of digital multimedia as a whole. The features established by Cubase, in particular its ‘innovative graphical tracks and timeline interface’ (see Figure 1), …
Continue reading “New Media, 1989: Cubase and the New Temporal Order”
Introduction Uber, Airbnb, Google, Amazon and Netflix are names that stress how data-driven systems are reshaping the world. Yet these platforms and services would not be possible without the data infrastructure that underpins them. Far from being nebulous and immaterial, “the cloud” is highly material, taking the form of the copper and cables, switches and …
Continue reading “Imperfect Orchestration: Inside the Data Center’s Struggle for Efficiency”
Introduction It rests on your desk: a small, surprisingly heavy, aluminum rectangular brick with 47 switches and a USB cable connecting it to the computer (Figure 1). Having constructed it from a kit, you must now ensure that it works before affixing keycaps. A message appears on the monitor from the operating system: ‘your keyboard …
Introduction Breaches, hacks and outages are in the news on a daily basis. Yet dependencies on digital technologies ever deepen. The distribution of renewable energy calls for smart grids, autonomous vehicles for machine vision, ‘just in time’ industrial production for software-driven orchestration. Exposure to computational vulnerabilities has become a quotidian feature of contemporary existence, but …
Continue reading “Creative Malfunction: Finding fault with Rowhammer”