Introduce Yourself (2026)

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• Waliya

  January 11

  I am Yohanna Joseph Waliya, a PhD Scholar at the University of Lagos. He obtained M.A. French Literature (Twitterature;Twitterbot poetry) at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. I am a Nigerian digital poet, distant writer, ludokinetic writer, novelist, playwright, python programmer, winner of the Janusz Korczak Prize for Global South 2020, Electronic Literature Organization Research Fellow, UNESCO Janusz Korczak Fellow 2020, Creator & Curator of MAELD and ADELD [2022 Emerging Open Scholarship Award: Honourable mention by The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI)], Executive Director of AELA& ADELI (https://african-elit.org ), International Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Web and Social Media [ICWSM ] Scholar 2021-2022, and HASTAC Scholar 2021-2023. He writes in English and French. Among his works are : La récolte de vie (play), Monde 2.0 (play), Hégémonie Disparue (novel), Quand l’Afrique se lèvera (novel), Homosalus (digital poetry), Momenta (digital poetry), @TinyKorczak (Twitterbot-poetry), Climatophosis (digital poetry: The best use of DH for Fun 2020), Inferno 2.0 (ludokinetic poetry) etc. I am also a lecturer at the Nigeria French Language Village, Ajara-Badagry, Lagos. My research interests cover distant writing, distant reading, digital poetry, Metaversal literature, Twitterbot-poetry, Twitterature, Digital Humanities and language discourse, training Artificial Intelligence to speak Nigerian Pidgin English. Presently I am researching Neurocomputational poetics and digital poetry. I have been attending CCSWG since 2018.
• ranjodh

  January 12

  I am Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, a scholar of the politicoeconomic and sociocultural entanglements of technological media, currently employed at the University of Basel. I write about infrastructures, old and new, among other topics. I have a background as a computer scientist, and been a close CCS follower for nearly a decade now. Looking forward to interfacing with y'all.
• moritz.maehr

  January 12

  Hi everyone — I’m Moritz Mähr (he/him), based in Zürich/Bern. I’m an associate researcher in Digital Humanities (University of Bern) and an information & library science specialist with Research Analytics Services (ETH Zurich). My work sits at the intersection of digital history, STS, and open research infrastructure, with a focus on social history of computing, digital source criticism in the age of AI, and minimal-computing approaches to (public) history.

  • Website: https://moritzmaehr.ch
  • GitHub: https://github.com/maehr
  • ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1367-1618
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moritz-maehr
• JoeyJones

  January 12

  Hi all. I'm Joey Jones and this is my fourth time at the Critical Code Studies working group. This last year I completed a PhD at the University of Southampton, focused on interactive digital narrative. I'm an author of interactive fiction, generative art bots and more. I'm looking forward to once again working on a Code Critique!

  http:///www.joeyjon.es | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1146-1668
• jshrager

  January 12

  Hi I'm Jeff Shrager, located in Palo Alto. My background spans computer science, cognitive psychology, computational biology, and bioinformatics. I spent about 25 years as an adjunct professor in Stanford's Symbolic Systems program, and I'm currently Chief Scientist at Bennu Climate, Inc. where I work no methane removal technology.

  Back in 1973 I wrote a BASIC version of ELIZA that was published in Creative Computing (in 1977), and whih was ported to countless early personal computers, spawning hundreds of knockoffs. What brought me to software archaeology, decades later, was thinking about "code genealogy", how software evolves and branches, a bit like biological lineages, so I'm always on the lookout for software "missing links" and the roots of code lineages.

  In 2021 "Team ELIZA" (Mark and me and a few others who can out themselves if they like) rediscovered the mother of all roots, the root of the ELIZA tree: The source code for the original MAD-SLIP ELIZA in Joseph Weizenbaum's archives at MIT, and we've spent the last few years peicing analyzing and reanimating this historic code.

  Now I'm working on reanimating the very first AIs, The Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver, written by Simon, Newell, and their co-workers at RAND and Carnegie Tech (now CMU) in the mid 1950s! These were written in an obscure Lisp precursor called IPL-V. I've built an IPL-V interpreter that can run these original programs. I think Mark wants me to talk about this on a thread here this month.
• SarahCiston

  January 12

  Hi I'm Sarah Ciston, an artist-researcher doing things in Critical AI and Critical–Creative Coding. I'm based in Cologne at the Academy of Media Arts, continuing the Code Collective lab I started in Los Angeles in 2019.

  I make work about the militarization of AI and about ideology and bias in datasets and large models. I'm particularly interested in how critical code studies can be applied across the AI pipeline.

  This is my 5th working group ?! and I'm also one of Team ELIZA , mentioned by @jshrager , who have been analyzing the lost ELIZA code as co-authors of Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI.
• Temkin

  January 12

  Hi, I'm Daniel Temkin. I'm a computational artist who makes, among other things, esoteric programming languages. I'm excited to discuss my new monograph, Forty-Four Esolangs, in this thread.

  I also write an esolang blog, esoteric.codes, where I recently helped uncover the long-lost source code for the early esolang, INTERCAL. Not as exciting as ELIZA, but still pretty cool -- nearly everyone used a derivative of Eric S Raymond's 1990 C-INTERCAL, which was written mostly from memory. The original code is from 1972 and written in SPITBOL.

  I'm not sure how many working groups I've been in so far, but always look forward to these!
• AlanBlackwell

  January 12

  Hi - I'm Alan Blackwell. This is my first time joining you guys. I've worked on things that resemble CCS in various ways, for about 30 years, most consistently in the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (which many years ago stopped doing much "Psychology", so we just call it PPIG now). My book Moral Codes argues that the world needs less AI, and better programming languages - and by better, I mean designed through a Critical Technical Practice, in the same way we should have been doing AI.
• iaine

  January 12

  Hi all,

  I'm Iain Emsley and this is my first time at CCS. I'm currently finishing my first book based on my thesis and doing some research into the history and relationship of computing and sound. I have been exploring Eric Sunderland's printed code for music on the Atlas machine written in ABL that is in Manchester's archive for a talk in early Spring.
• amitorit

  January 12 edited January 12

  Hello Folks!

  I’m Amit Ray and I teach in the English Department at Rochester Institute of Technology. Though I don’t consider myself a programmer, I have been interested in Critical Code Studies since I saw Mark speak on the topic at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference way, way back in 2007. Since 2013, have taught a cultural studies course on Open and Closed Source Software and Culture as part of our University’s Immersion in FOSS and Culture. A recent publication on agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance) and AI in First Monday can be found here: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13890
• jeremydouglass

  January 12

  Hi, I'm Jeremy Douglass, an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara, where I serve as the faculty director of the Transcriptions Lab and the Digital Arts & Humanities Commons.

  I have joined my colleague Mark Marino in organizing the biennial Critical Code Studies Working Group for going on sixteen years now. CCS has been a rewarding community where I can learn and grow, and I am excited to continue these conversations -- and begin new ones with new people. If there is any way that I can help (or just to say "hello") Please contact me on this forum or by email.

  My relevant research interests are in CCS, digital humanities, software studies, cultural analytics, and information visualization. I teach classes in narrative media, including audiobooks and podcasts since 1860, pop-up books and paper engineering, visual narrative (comics, manga, webtoons), electronic literature, and narrative video games. I'm interested in tracing the transition of interactive narrative from print to digital forms, particularly in the context of elit and game studies, and I work on projects on narrative encoding and visualization -- including Pathpattern for graphing interactive page space, and Panelcode for diagramming page composition (as in comics and graphic novels). More recently I have been thinking about AI/LLM-augmented code critiques using processes based on "persona games" and agent-based coding, programming, and software engineering paradigms.
• Lyr

  January 12

  Hello all!

  I'm Lyr Colin-Pacheco, currently PhD candidate in Comp Lit/Media Studies preparing to graduate at the University of Southern California. I'm not really fluent in code, though I aspire to be eventually, and hopefully will write my own pieces soon enough! My research focuses on the experience of existing through an avatar, in the context of gaming. In a few words, that means asking questions about embodiment, sexuality, or grief when they happen across a screen, involving a virtual body. I do have an attempt at a webpage, though I am still finding myself there.

  My interest in elit is perhaps pretty natural for someone who enjoys gaming and literature, but I've really come to enjoy elit works and critical code studies in the past few years. I'm participating in the upcoming The Joy of Electronic Literature with a small commentary piece on Nick Montfort's Letterformed Terrain.

  You'll be hearing from me as I was given the chance to co-organize this event, so I will probably be spamming your inboxes a little... sorry!
• andreask

  January 12 edited January 12

  Hello, my name is Andrea and I'm writing a fantasy series based in downtown Los Angeles designed for transmedia engagement (art activations! games and role-play!).

  I'm originally a documentary filmmaker but got a degree in Comparative Media Studies to bridge research practice with media production... my interests are in cybernetic thinking, postcolonial theory, ethnofiction, the philosophy of nothingness, and locating creativity, collective creativity, emergence, etc. from grassroots perspectives

  also I'm a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice about to enter my exams period this Spring. What I'm really building is a context engine for writing, world building, and co-creation which at this stage is an elevated productivity/meta-cognitive management system (and data gathering system) for my creative-critical practice. But archival database is in the works.

  The series is called UMEYA FLOWER (you heard here first) and riffs off PKD's counterfactual mid-century world where Los Angeles is colonized by Imperial Japan, the coasts controlled by the Yakuza, and conditions deteriorating to mass detention centers and labor camps. We follow the Bronze Front and its powers guarded by indigenous mysticism and last-standing sycamore tree, all based on the people's history and current housing developments) of DTLA.
• bee.rinaldi

  12:26AM

  Hello, all! My name is Abby (or Bee). I am a PhD Candidate in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University, currently wrapping up my dissertation on expressive computing. I study the rhetoric, design, and theory of programming languages using critical making methods. A lot of my work draws from posthuman and queer theory as applied to computational thinking, tracing programming as an act of world-building and storytelling. This is my first time in the CCSWG, and I am excited to learn from the many engineers, artists, rhetoricians, and others within this vibrant community.
• cschnitz

  1:04AM

  Hello hello! I'm Carly Schnitzler (she/her) and this is my third CCSWG--it is lovely to be sharing space with you all. I teach writing at Johns Hopkins and run If, Then: Technology and Poetics, a community working group and event series promoting inclusivity and skills-building in creative computation for artists, scholars, and teachers. Website with all of our events is up here--I hope many of you all can join us!

  I also write and research across digital rhetoric, e-lit, and HCI venues. Right now, I'm working on a fun collaborative project with Alicia Guo and Katy Gero on community-driven data governance for writing-as-training data.
• michael.falk

  4:00AM

  Hi all, I'm Michael (he/him; https://michaelfalk.io) and this is my first CCSWG. I'm a newbie to CCS. My first article in the field will hopefully appear this year... I'm from the Blue Mountains, in Australia, though I work in Melbourne. I run an online CCS reading group, anticodians.org, where we read literate programs out loud every fortnight, discussing every aspect of the code that strikes the participants' fancies as we go. I'm really excited for the CCSWG, and keen to learn what people have to say about the symbolism of code.
• collier.nogues

  8:21AM

  Hi all, I’m Collier Nogues (she/her); I'm a digital poet mostly but also increasingly an artist; also an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I’ve co-authored some scholarly work on AI and creativity in pedagogical contexts and in creative disciplines, and lately I’ve been thinking alongside a pair of interaction designer colleagues about the future of the book in the face of AI. I’m also finishing up (I hope) a creative project that leverages immersive VR poetry, autoethnography, and archival materials to connect and critique military practices of tourism, occupation, and homemaking across Okinawa (where I grew up on a US military base), Guam, Korea, and the Philippines.

  This is my first working group, though I’ve learned a lot from the previous publicly archived ones (2022, 2024). Otherwise my exposure to Critical Code Studies has been mostly through reading/viewing/playing creative projects made by writers/artists like Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Jhave Johnston. I don't know how to code beyond thrashing around and making a mess, but I like doing it, and I really like reading and thinking about codework. I also want to introduce it, if I can figure out how, to students who are new to both coding and creative writing. I'm excited to learn more from you all!
• GregorGB

  8:27AM

  Hi, I'm Gregor (he/him) and this is also my first CCSWG. I work as a postdoc at Kiel University in northern Germany, researching computer science education and teaching ethics for computer scientists and, for the first time this semester, CCS. My background is in computer science, philosophy, and digital humanities, but I also worked for several years as a software developer in various companies.