a journal of software studies
The history of science and technology has, until relatively recently, neglected the study of textbooks. However, more recent scholarship has shown how important they have been, not only pedagogically, but also to the creation and direction of various fields like chemistry and physics.1 Arguably computer science textbooks are and have been pivotal for the field …
One of the indubitable strengths of the “Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image” 1 is that it doesn’t offer an answer to what a meme is. In a way, it isn’t even interested in stabilising or fixing the understanding of memes: instead, many of the contributions assembled in it pull at, disorganise …
Continue reading “Review of ‘Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image’”
If you have been watching any of the various series recently produced for the Star Wars franchise, you may have noticed a curious kind of continuity editing: the screens that are used to target weapons and navigate outer space display computer graphics in the style of the 1970s. On these screens appear wireframes rather than …
Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on sits right at the middle, as well as on the front cover, of Seb Franklin’s recent book The Digitally Disposed. Perry’s artwork consists of a large projection of an animated fragment of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840’s Slave ship, a painting that depicts the infamous 1781 Zong massacre in which over 130 …
Datafication has been the hallmark of modern governance, all the way back to the definition of statistics as “science of data about the state” in mid-18th century Prussia. Creating reductionist regularity, abstracting from the infinite complexity of local, embodied experience, enabled a new scale and complexity by which the state could organize the life of …
1. Introduction Network science emerges as a term in the late nineteen-nineties and consists of a series of ‘content agnostic’ ways to analyse structures of various kinds as networks or graphs 1. It can be understood as a revival of the much older social network analysis through the influence of physics. 2 The kind of …
It has actually been two years since the last issue of Computational Culture was published. A combination of the pandemic and academic ‘restructuring’ at more than one institution resulted in a delay that seems characteristic of the times. More broadly, the increasing demands on researchers have meant that the normal process of peer review has …
‘Another Analytics is Possible’ says the sticker on my laptop, one of the more intriguing items included in the swag bag of a scholarly conference in London. As a slogan it’s not the most radical, provocative or even comprehensible at first glance. It might be a critique of existing computational analytics – a concern with …
Introduction In 2013, Google announced the creation of a cloud-less, night-less, Spring-all-over image of the Earth. This new cloud-free image–assembled from a 40-year archive of satellite images–allowed anyone to see, with perfect clarity, any spot on the Earth’s surface. Creating this new image upgraded Google’s mapping products. Older and less-clear images were updated. Certain parts …
Introduction Between the years of 2013 and 2020, I carried out a multi-layered, intersectional interrogation of the supposedly obsolete programming language COBOL, with the aim to provide insights into aspects of global information architectures that are otherwise hidden and inaccessible. This led me to engage with a form of human-machine interchange that, unlike the ideal …
Continue reading “Spaces of Flaws of Flows: COBOL and the back-back-ends of development”
1. A platform for urban governance As the ‘smart city’ concept has spread globally within the last few years, there has been a growing chorus of critics suggesting urban governance has been de-politicised through the reduction of social problems towards data modelling and technical challenges1. In order to respond to these critiques, a lot of …
The Software Studies series launched in 2009, under the guidance of editors Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. For over a decade, the series was dedicated to publishing the best new work that tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society through the scholarly modes of the humanities …