Introduce Yourself (2026)

markcmarino · January 10

Welcome!

Please reply here with a brief introduction of yourself and your interests in Critical Code Studies. Some of us are first-timers, 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. Feel free to also give us a preview of a code critique you plan to post.

The "Introduce Yourself" thread is a great tradition of this Working Group. For a sense of everyone who has come before, browse the self-introductions from 2024, 2022, 2020, and 2018....

Waliya · January 11

Good day, I am Yohanna Joseph Waliya, a PhD Scholar at the University of Lagos. I 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.

Me: https://sites.google.com/view/jeffshrager-org/home
IPL-V: youtu.be/Q6e8XQEdOFY (missing http so that these don't insert)
The Logic Theorist: youtu.be/qmE5o2ezqBg (missing http "")

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

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

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 · January 13

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 · January 13

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 · January 13

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 · January 13

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 · January 13

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.

arpitarathod · January 13

Hi, I am Arpita (she/her). I work as a Research Assistant/Scholar at Centre for Translation and Digital Humanities, Ravenshaw University, India. I work at intersection of intersection of archiving practices, language preservation, and responsible NLP methods, with a focus on low-resource and Indic languages. I am excited to be here again and would love to talk about pedagogical practices for teaching CCS to literature student simultaneously with coding.

période · January 13

Hi!

My name is Pierre, I work as a postdoc at the University of Basel (with Ranjodh), and this is something like my fourth CCSWG Looking forward as usual!

I have a background in political science and game design wrote a PhD on the aesthetics of code (https://source.enframed.net). I work on the normative and prescriptive aspects of software as they are inscribed in source code; right now, I'm working on the Yandex code (code critique upcoming!) and on the Moodle source code, and preparing a paper on fairness/bias in PL design.

martinbartelmus · January 13

Hey everyone, my name is Martin, and I am a postdoc at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in the department of German Literature Studies. This is my second time here, and I am interested in the intersection of CCS and literature, as well as theoretical (post-)grammatological questions about code and writing. I’m looking forward to all the interesting panels!

luisnavarrodelangel · January 13

Hi everyone, my name is Luis Navarro (he/him). I am a new media artist and a part-time instructor at McMaster University (Canada). I am currently teaching a course called "Coding Inquiry" where we are reviewing critical code studies and rhetorical code studies frameworks. During my PhD, I also created a computer language for Latin Dance music, particularly cumbia music. I would like to share this project with you and hopefully critique it in the upcoming weeks: https://seis8s.org/.

Waliya · January 13

I am Yohanna Joseph Waliya, a PhD Scholar at the University of Lagos. He obtained M.A. French Literatu (Twitterature;Twitterbot poetry) at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. He is 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, 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, Scrimba Scholar 2022-2023, 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. He is also a lecturer at the Nigeria French Language Village, Ajara-Badagry, Lagos. His 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
I critiqued the codes of @Protestitas by Leonardo Flores in my Master programme. I am eager to learn more on critical code studies for my PhD thesis.

song.jongbeen · January 13

Hello everyone,

My name is Jongbeen Song, and this is my first time participating in the Critical Code Studies Working Group. I am currently a master’s student in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Korea University in Seoul, with a specialization in Communication and Journalism on Science and Technology.

My academic background is in both English Linguistics & Language Technology and Computer & Electronic Systems Engineering, and through this interdisciplinary training I became increasingly interested not only in how AI systems work, but also in how they shape knowledge, discourse, and social power. This led me to STS, where I now study AI and language technologies as sociotechnical and political artifacts.

At the moment, I am writing a paper on political bias in Korean large language models, examining how ideological tendencies are embedded in training data and model architectures, and how these systems reproduce and normalize political worldviews through automated language generation.

I am especially interested in critical approaches to code and AI as cultural media — not only as technical infrastructures, but as agents that participate in the circulation of narratives, ideologies, and forms of authority. I see AI systems as both consumers and producers of media, continuously reshaping public discourse in ways that demand careful critical reading.

I am excited to learn from this community and to engage in conversations about code, software, and AI from critical, humanistic, and interdisciplinary perspectives. I look forward to learning how others read, interpret, and critique code as a cultural and political form.

Thank you, and I’m very glad to be here.

martapcampos · January 13

Hi! My name is Marta, and it's my second time joining this working group.

I consider myself an artist and a researcher. In the last few years, I've been writing my PhD on the aesthetic and pedagogical uses of coding (and hopefully I'll defend my thesis this year, fingers crossed).

One of my main interests is code poetry. Last year I wrote an artist book about a fictional AI character who uses programming languages in an expressive way to communicate with us: https://martapcampos.com/en/projects/goodbye-world/

I'm truly looking forward to reading and trying to join some of the discussions.

Thank you!

JudyMalloy · January 14

Hello friends and new friends! I'm Judy Malloy. A poet and information artist, who works at the conjunction of programmed electronic manuscripts and generative poetry, I followed a vision that began with coding for a NASA contractor and with the contingent creation of experimental artist books. I currently teach as a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1986, I wrote and programmed the groundbreaking hyperfiction Uncle Roger (BASIC and UNIX Shell Scripts) and subsequently I wrote and programed a series of electronic manuscripts that range from Forward Anywhere, created with Cathy Marshall under the auspices of Xerox Parc; to the ubicomp aleatoric system "The Fabric of everyday Life"; to the 2025 electronic manuscript "Hunting and Gathering in Cyberspace" which premiered at the Electronic Literature Organization's 25th Anniversary Conference and received Honorable Mention for The Robert Coover Prize for the best 2025 Work of Electronic Literature.

When in 2024, “Bad Information”, my early work (1986!) on reliability in datasets was presented at the Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery of Art, it was evident that although the need for reliable data is now generally understood, the role of algorithms in generating data from AI systems is less publicly understood. Thus, I am currently creating an information art model to demonstrate this. To find out more, visit
https://www.narrabase.net/algorithms/flagrant_algorithms_notes.pdf

Hopefully “The Flagrant Algorithms” will be up and running during this edition of the legendary Critical Code Studies Working Group!

anthony_hay · January 14

Hi. My name is Anthony and I live in Devon in the south west of England, UK. My first job was with Digital Research in the 1980s working on operating systems and graphics device drivers for personal computers. I continue to write code because getting a machine to do something interesting is fun and sometimes useful. I’m still asking the questions, like “how does it work” and “can I make one,” that I was asking as a child.

There are many dimensions of code that interest me. For example, whether it is correct and does not fail to perform its intended function, is an adequate analogue of whatever system it was intended to model, and so on. I’m here to learn more about the broader culture of code.

thgie · January 14

Hi folks, thanks for having me!

I'm Adrian, at home at the German/French language border within Switzerland. I'm currently working on my paper-based doctoral thesis in digital humanities at the University of Bern and have a background as software dev (practice) and in design (education). My current research focus is on video game programming in the 1980s. I'm somewhat influenced by new materialism and regard code as a design material. I'm basically interested how code can hold onto or materialize a dev's intentions and translate these into player phenomenologies, so topics like affordances, Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" or Berry's "computational image" are important to me.

Besides that I love learning about all kinds of weird and lovely things people create with, through, and around code, be it esoteric languages, static site generators written in assembly, or games that life in font files.

To fruitful discussions!

dcao · January 14

Hey y'all!!

My name is David (they/them), and I'm a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, with a background in both computer science and ethnic studies. This is my first time participating in a CCS Working Group, and I'm excited to be in community with y'all!

My PhD focuses on the development of coding languages, tools, and environments, with a particular interest in developing coding tools for movement workers and organizers. In the context of this working group, I'm interested in the ways that we can intervene in language design towards explicitly queer, feminist, and decolonial close readings of code. I'm also working on a digital archive of the Asian American movement of the 60s and 70s—thinking about the computing and programming practices involved in archival work—and I'm also writing an article on the queer subcommunities within the Rust programming language—thinking about the political economy of programming tools.

More broadly, I've been a huge fan of quirky programming languages for many years and I love seeing all the ways folks use and misuse programming languages!! Very excited to get to share thoughts on all of that and more over these next few weeks and beyond :^)

hmkinsle · January 15

Hey, y'all,

I'm Haley Kinsler, and this is my first time joining CCSWG! I am a PhD student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State (Eastern US), where I also received my MA of English in Linguistics. I am a novice Python programmer, so I am joining this year's working group with a deep interest in interrogating the social practices shared by programmers, especially from the lens of pedagogy and learning. At a time when concerns about AI, "vibe coding", and institutional resources and labor inequities abound, I am interested in the implications of CCS for programming learners and teachers particularly in the humanities, where formal programming training can be difficult to access or provide. Some questions in this line of thinking that I am hoping to reflect on for the next several weeks:

What literacy practices are necessary for engaging in CCS readings, particularly in instances where programming languages are varied in their syntax, methods for compiling, and the like?
How do we grapple with providing new learners the kinds of broader conceptual understandings necessary to do CCS work in an environment where isolated snippets of code are increasingly being generated through LLMs?
What are some of the pedagogical affordances for novice programmers who learn to engage with code critically as they are learning the basics of a new language, and how do these pedagogical considerations fit into CCS as a field?

tiffany.fung · January 15

Hi everyone, my name is Tiffany. I’m a creative writer and an MPhil research postgraduate student in English literary studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I’m very much a beginner when it comes to code and code studies, but I’m currently researching Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s computational poetry, and I’m interested in thinking about the inherent violence in algorithmic poetry, and how it can be considered as a form of digital erasure. This is my first CCSWG and I’m excited to learn from everyone and join in on the discussions!

christina · January 17

Hi all, sorry I'm so late to introduce myself! My name is Christina and this is my third time joining. I'm a software engineer, but currently in grad school studying applied machine learning. Outside of that, I love looking at code as a medium and examining it from a more cross-disciplinary perspective. I'm especially looking forward to week three this year!

gregorybringman · January 18

I’m Gregory Bringman, a researcher/participant in CCS going back to the mid-to-late aughts. The philosophy of L’Âge classique and the Enlightenment is another focus of mine, as well as applying CCS to this period. I look forward to continuing this year’s discussion...

mehul.desai · January 19

Hello everyone!

My name is Mehul Desai. I am a research scholar at Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad, India. My research interests focus on Electronic literature, Interactive Digital Narratives, and Digital Humanities practices in India.

I come from the world of English Literature, where I was trained to read metaphors, rhythms, silences, and subtexts. For a long time, I believed creativity belonged only to words, to poems and stories, to ink and imagination. But then I encountered something I never expected: code.

At first, code felt like a strict, systematic language, almost too mechanical to be beautiful. Yet, slowly, I began to realize that code also has its own grammar, its own rhythm, and its own kind of poetics. It can build worlds, generate poems, and produce aesthetic experiences through logic itself. That discovery fascinated me deeply.

Though I’m still a beginner in coding, I’m genuinely excited by its possibilities. Now, as a scholar of Electronic Literature and Interactive Digital Narratives, I have also created a few works of electronic literature, and the experience has strengthened my curiosity about the relationship between literary imagination and computational language.

In this journey, I have also co-founded the Indian Consortium for Interactive Digital Narratives (ICIDN) with Dr. Shanmugapriya, India’s first platform aimed at fostering creativity and scholarship in Interactive Digital Narratives through its various forms such as (but not limited to) electronic literature, video games, digital arts, interactive narratives, and other emerging digital expressions.

I’m truly looking forward to learning from all of you and engaging in scholarly conversations around Critical Code Studies, where code is not only written, but also read, interpreted, and critically understood. I’m also very interested in collaborating with anyone who is interested in future projects that explore CCS in innovative and meaningful ways.

orladelaney9 · January 19

Hi all!

I'm Orla Delaney, a Teaching Associate and recent PhD at the University of Cambridge. My main area of interest is in digital cultural heritage: my PhD constructed a new theorisation of the collections database infrastructure as a medium, and I have a lot of experience working with (and theorising) metadata standards and linked open data in the cultural heritage space. To that end, CCS has been a valuable addition to my methodological toolkit, and fits into a broad interest in the ways in which technological and information objects might be thought of and treated as texts, and the bringing to bear of literary-theoretical methods on the computational. Within CCS, I'm interested in questions of how code and code-forms are constructed by our methods - what it means to think of code as a readable object, and the relationship between CCS and other forms of reading, both close and distant.

With Claire Carroll and David Berry, I'm currently co-editing a special issue of AI & Society on CCS, themed around the conversation as a means of exploring and thinking through code. Our first papers are already up online and we're hoping to have the full issue out early this year.

I'm looking forward to getting stuck into some conversations here, where I'm a participant for the second time. I'm also interested in collaborating on any future projects involving CCS, particularly with other researchers based in the UK and Europe, and exploring the intersection between CCS and other critical disciplines under the broad umbrella of DH, specifically AI studies.

Titaÿna · January 19

Hi everyone!

I'm Titaÿna Kauffmann Will, PhD candidate at the C²DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg.

My thesis – Code as a Source - explores how source code can function as a historical source, both as heritage to preserve and as primary material for historians to interpret. I'm also part of the organizing committee for the "Source Code Exhibition" opening January 29 at UNESCO Paris, marking Software Heritage's tenth anniversary. With Pierre (who's on the scientific committee), we'll be presenting the exhibition during Week 3.

Looking forward to the discussions!

dancox · January 20

Hi, all!

My name is Dan Cox. I'm an Assistant Professor of Game Design at Illinois State University (ISU) in the United States. I currently teach game programming for the Unity and Unreal game engines and also connected topics including game production and game narrative development.

For over a decade, I was heavily involved in multiple electronic literature communities including writing most of what became the Twine Cookbook, the first textbook on the narrative scripting language ink, and hundreds of videos on various tools and languages on my YouTube channel including a more recent shift to archiving traversals of early games made with authoring tools such as Ren'Py and Bitsy.

In 2023, I defended my PhD dissertation using critical code studies + media archaeology to examine the history of Twine and the role of story formats (think small programming languages inside Twine) across multiple generations. While parts of my work researching the the history of programming languages made its way into an article named "Routine, Twisty, and Queer: Pasts and Futures of Games Programming Pedagogy with No and Low Code Tools" (with John Murray and Anastasia Salter) in early 2025, I've mostly been focusing on getting used to the midwestern United States and expectations of my new job. (I started at ISU in Fall 2024, just over a year ago as of this writing.)

I look forward to seeing what others have been doing recently and slowly getting back into critical code studies related research over 2026.

ErikaF · January 20

Hello friends, mostly unkown!
I'm picking up the conversation late (again) as I was with family last week and then zhen I finally got to it yesterday... got the news that Luna, my beloved dog living with them died in the morning... ( so shock and brain block...
When I'm not there walking with Luna, I'm a professor of (French) literature at the University of Toulouse in France, specialised in electronic literature and managing a master in creative writing, in which I also try to sneak in some familiarization with the digital tools and how they can expand (and reduce) creative horizons.
My background is also in literature (with a thesis on Proust and philosophy), but I'm very code curious, so to speak. In my sense we cannot fully understand digital creations without looking at their making and functioning, including code, platform, interface, etc. even though proportions of the importance of each might vary according to work.
I 2021 I was lucky enough to get funding for a one-year "discipline hop" into computing and learn a bit of HTML, JS, Python, as well as key notions about networks and systems. I haven't got too far but can now at least better understand coder and general computing lingo.
In the past couple of years I have been focusing on the kinetic poetry of Tibor Papp (some videos here) and the text generators of Jean-Pierre Balpe, on whom I also organised a conference.
I keep digging into Balpe's archives and got some old code in Basic and HyperTalk he wrote, and colleagues have the later versions they coded for the web in Java, Flash (yes, auch..) and now rewriting in JS. The generators are a form of symbolic AI and I'm curious to understand its various stages of development and growth, as well as its fundamental differences from connectionist AI. I tested ChatGPT in reading a HyperTalk version and the response sounded correct and relevant, but I wonder if anyone else has experience with it. I can post the code and the response for a discussion (or at least part of them - need to identify which part) but will also be interested in reading the other threads.
More generally, I'm also interested in preservation issues, as the rich French history and corpus of this stuff is getting lost and not being taken care of at the moment...
(And apologies if my presence remains light - exams session just ended here, I'm getting the scripts to mark just when term is starting too...)

yves_baechtiger · January 20

Hey everyone,

I’m also a bit of a latecomer.

My name is Yves and I’m a research software engineer based in Switzerland, mainly working in high-performance computing and computer vision. At the moment, most of my work is on projects around 3D reconstruction and simulations - specifically building geometric models from LiDAR point cloud data. That tends to involve a lot of rule-based optimization techniques and fairly low-level algorithms: the kind of problems that scale up very quickly and demand a lot of compute, which in turn means the code has to be written and optimized quite carefully. Because of that, I’m planning to contribute something along those lines to the Code Critique section.

Before moving into computer science, I studied art, so in a previous life I was much more immersed in critical theory than in code. That’s probably where my interest in more reflective or critical perspectives comes from, even if these days it mostly shows up as a philosophical curiosity about the notion of computation itself—what it is, how it works, and how it shapes the way we think and build systems.

Oh, and btw: I’m here because Moritz Maehr invited me after yet another discussion about whether AI will render me useless, at which point “joining this group” was proposed as a form of perspective ;-)

Looking forward to the discussions!

Zach_Mann · January 20

Hi everyone, apologies for the late join. My name is Zach Mann. I've been involved as an organizer for past CSS working groups, now participating as an attendee. I work in research support at USC on the staff side now, but I am (aspirationally) still doing research myself.

I received a PhD at USC in English, and my dissertation was on intellectual labor and early (early!) programmable machines -- still catching up to the 21st century.

Howdy, Stranger!

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