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.

Last week marked the end of our programming for the 2024 Critical Code Studies Working Group. Thank you all for a productive and enlightening 8th biennial!

Our forum will remain open to replies for one extra week. Many need just a bit more time to contribute one last response. If you wish to leave any last comments, reactions, brainstorms or critiques on any working group discussion (Weeks 1-4), please do so.

If you wish to contribute CCS teaching materials or experiences please comment in Craig Dietrich's Teaching CCS main thread or create your own Week 4 thread with syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, exercises, or workshops.

By this Sunday Mar 3rd please contribute any new code critiques if you still wish to do so. This will allow time for respondents.

After next Sat Mar 9th all threads will close for new comments and be archived for editing and republication. Past working groups have appeared in Electronic Book Review.

Also, keep in mind that participants are invited to use book discount from The MIT Press discount code for books related to Critical Code Studies and to contribute items to the CCS Zotero Bibliography.

Our topic schedule this year has included:

• Feb 5 Week 1: Queer(ing) Code
• Feb 12 Week 2: AI and CCS
• Feb 19 Week 3: DHQ Special Issues
• Feb 26 Week 4: Teaching Code Studies

Special thanks to hosts Edmond Y. Chang & Jarah Moesch for leading "Queer(ing) Code" and to Marylyn Tan for contributing her featured poem, to Craig Dietrich for leading "Teaching Critical Code Studies", and to our co-hosts and guest authors from the Critical Code Studies special issues of Digital Humanities Quarterly: David Berry, Jason Boyd, Kevin Brock, Matthew Burton, Evan Buswell, John Cayley, Lai-Tze Fan, Minh Hua, Zach Mann, Rita Raley, Daniel Temkin, Annette Vee, Zach Whalen, and Joris Van Zundert.

Thanks also to the organizers: Lyr Colin, Andrea Kim, Elea Zhong, Zachary Mann, Jeremy Douglass, and Mark C. Marino, to our sponsors, the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at the University of Southern California and the Digital Arts & Humanities Commons at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and to Digital Humanities Quarterly and The MIT Press for supporting scholarship in Critical Code Studies.

Finally, our thanks to YOU for being a participant in this working group! We look forward to continuing the conversation in the months and years to come before reconvening for CCSWG 2026. Please contact us to discuss ideas for the next biennale! To keep up with calls and events in the meantime watch HaCCS Lab (https://haccslab.com) and Critical Code Studies (https://criticalcodestudies.com) or follow on social media.

with best regards,
Jeremy, Mark, Zach, Andrea, Lyr, and Elea

• calls for papers / CFPs
• job calls
• grant programs
• projects
• events

...or anything else that might interest members of the Critical Code Studies Working Group!

Welcome to the 2024 Critical Code Studies Working group. In this short video, Jeremy and I kick off our discussions.

CCSWG is the major online think tank for Critical Code Studies, a hub of dialogue and collaborative inquiry that generates major thrust in the reading of code. Discussion and code critiques from previous working groups have appeared in electronic book review and have contributed to conference panels, essays, books, and more, including multiple book projects with The MIT Press and special issues of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

• Feb 5 Week 1: Queer(ing) Code
• Feb 12 Week 2: AI and CCS
• Feb 19 Week 3: DHQ Special Issues
• Feb 26 Week 4: Teaching Code Studies

If you're brand new to CCS, you should know:
Critical Code Studies is an emerging field of study exploring the extra-functional significance of computer source code. "Extra" does not mean outside of the function, but growing out from. Code is the means of a discussion, rather than the ends, the entry point into a discussion of technoculture. CCS is not so much an approach but a growing collection of methods and discourse.

To orient yourself, consider reading

• The Original Manifesto
• The Introduction to_ Critical Code Studies_.
• This analysis of the Transborder Immigrant Tool

If you're brand new to the Working Groups, you should know:
During this biennial event, we dig deep into code and coding culture with a diverse, interdisciplinary community of artists, practitioners, and scholars. The past two CCSWGs are available publicly. The previous ones were closed to participants only. However, you can read previous discussions from the first Working Group in electric book review, where this year's weekly discussion was held.

• 2022 Critical Code Studies Working Group
• 2020 Critical Code Studies Working Group
• 2018 Critical Code Studies Working Group

The challenge is to keep the focus on code, but of course, we discuss many aspects of the programs and their contexts. However, at this event we have an opportunity to tackle the hardest part of this interpretive and creative practice. We encourage you to start a Code Critique thread or to join in on someone else's. Remember, you don't need to know what you want out of that discussion when you post that. Our group has enough specialties, interests, and approaches to find interesting gems in it or interesting ideas to discuss related to it.

But let's use this thread for any questions you have about this emerging field!

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.

Keep in mind that the CCSWG is an international community, with participants joining from a wide variety of backgrounds, cultural contexts, and language communities.

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 also intend to periodically republish excerpts from main (featured) 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.

This is a single press discount list -- there are many works in CCS from presses which do not currently offer a 2024 participant discount, e.g. Reading Project (U Iowa), The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillion), and Metagaming (Minnesota UP), et cetera. For a general bibliography of works in Critical Code Studies, please see: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1031/critical_code_studies

Critical Code Studies [The MIT Press]

• Critical Code Studies by Mark C. Marino
• 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample and Noah Vawter
• Coding as Creative Medium by Golan Levin and Tega Brain
• Coding Literacy by Annette Vee
• Exploring Programming for the Arts and Humanities, 2nd edition, Nick Montfort
• Flash by Anastasia Salter and John Murray
• Live Coding by Alan F. Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Thor Magnusson
• Speaking Code by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean [also direct]
• Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. by Matthew Fuller [also direct]
• Your Computer is on Fire, edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip

Software Studies, Platform Studies, Media Archaeology and Digital Culture (Selections) [The MIT Press]

• The Metainterface by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold
• How Pac-Man Eats by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
• Expressive Processing by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
• The Software Arts by Warren Sack
• Programmed Visions by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
• The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton
• The Imaginary App by Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko

If there is a work in the catalog of The MIT Press that you recommend we add to this list, please, suggest it in the comments below or contact the working group admins.