a journal of software studies
Introduction During a scene in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street film sequel, titled Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,1 the young trader Jake Moore asks investment bank CEO Bretton James a question: “What’s your number? The amount of money you would need to be able to walk away from it all and just live happily-ever-after. See, I find that everybody …
Used by hundreds of millions on a daily basis, there is finally a comprehensive study out on the MP3 audio standard. Sound theorist Jonathan Sterne not only describes the political economic background of how this technology came into being in the early 1990s but also provides the reader with an interesting history of sound and …
Continue reading “Reflections on the MP3 Format: Interview with Jonathan Sterne”
This fourth issue of Computational Culture is, in the lingo of academic journals, an ‘open’ issue. It wasn’t edited together with a view to following a single matter of concern, or even with a view to underlying ‘disciplinary’ coherence – indeed, as work that situates itself in the loose constellation of analytic concerns represented by …
From the start, in Contagious Architecture, the proposition is this: uncertainty and incomputability are intrinsic to computation. Looking for ways of accounting for a new digital space composed of ‘alien rule’ and ‘internal anomalies’ and of defining an algorithmic aesthetics proper to the contingencies, abstractions and potentialities of code forms the area of concern of …
Continue reading “Algorithmic Thought: a review of Contagious Architecture by Luciana Parisi”
Re-collection. Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito asks the question of how our increasingly digital civilisation will persist beyond our lifetimes. The authors focus on the preservation of new media art as a case study in new media’s broader challenge to social memory. Rinehart and Ippolito are well-known names …
Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France. That is why Molière …
The Wikipedia article “Criticism of Facebook” was created in August 2007. What was once a few paragraphs about privacy and the risks of posting illicit photographs, is, seven years later, a massive litany of psychological effects, censorship cases, lawsuits, hate groups, Terms of Service disputes and security flaws.1 Among some 20 subject headings and 15,000 …
Continue reading “Review of Reverse Engineering Social Media”
Editorial Issue Four Articles pop Paul Dourish, NoSQL: The Shifting Materialities of Database Technology Irina Kaldrack and Theo Röhle, Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook’s Open Graph Benjamin Grosser, What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook Dennis Tenen and Maxwell Foxman, Book Piracy as Peer Preservation Alex Taylor, …
Field Report for Critical Code Studies, 2014 Over the past seven years since the publication of the manifesto on Critical Code Studies (CCS), 1 the early explorers have established that examining code using humanities-style interpretive methodologies is a valuable part of the analysis of software and programming culture and have shown the first signs of …
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Introduction Computation is giving rise to new scientific practices and, specifically, new capacities for investigating the complexities of the physical and natural world. The grand claims sometimes conflate computation and science, and go so far as to imagine a ‘computational science’ replacing science as we know it (cf. Carlson, 2011). Looking past the heady rhetoric, …
Continue reading “Modelling biology – working through (in-)stabilities and frictions”
Introduction Databases make the world. They do so in at least two ways. The first and more trivial of these is that the world is increasingly made up of databases, as digital technologies continue to supplement, surround, or displace other forms of record keeping. The second and more consequential way in which databases make the …
Continue reading “No SQL: The Shifting Materialities of Database Technology”
As part of the Infrastructures series edited by Geoffrey Bowker and Paul N. Edwards, and with a provocative and engaging title that addresses what the editor of the book, Lisa Gitelman, defines in her acknowledgements as the emerging field of data studies, it is no wonder that expectations of this book run undoubtedly high. Organised …
Continue reading “How Crucial is Rawness? Review of Raw Data is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman (Ed.)”
Introduction ‘Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life,’ according to the equally euphemistic and oddly reserved self-description of the most popular social media platform. If this slogan is taken seriously – which certainly seems opportune in the light of the ‘mass’ of a billion users – then the questions arise …
Continue reading “Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook’s Open Graph”