This review of the Software Studies Lexicon was written in June 2007 after Matthew Fuller was kind enough to send me a sneak preview pre-publication copy. I sent the PDF of the Software Studies Review to Fuller to which he replied with some insightful remarks on my suggestion for a digital working environment, see update below.

Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2008. 334 pp. $28.00 USD. ISBN-10: 0262062747

Reviewed by Anne Helmond. June 2007, University of Amsterdam

Software Studies, a forthcoming lexicon edited by Matthew Fuller, consists of thirty-nine entries from mostly different authors. The title refers both to the object of study and the form of the project consisting of numerous short studies. Each of the “software studies” in the book stands on its own and Fuller celebrates the multi-disciplinary diversity of the authors. They come from different fields of study including art and design, literary theory, computation and free and open source software. Fuller has not gone as far as to attempt to start a new field of study but instead Software Studies calls for new theorizations of software from areas that “have not historically ‘owned’ software” such as media studies. The fields that are currently concerned with culture and media could contribute to a new approach to software with their critical perspectives on politics, society and matter.

Fuller states that he has chosen the form of a lexicon because it is provisional, scalable and contains pathways. It is provisional because it serves for the time being because software is not a static object and is therefore hard to pin down. Relations in and around software are constantly changing and a lexicon can serve as a temporary overview. Unlike a dictionary a lexicon is scalable and it does not strive to be complete and this incompleteness is “a virtue” according to Fuller.  The entries can be seen as different pathways into software that do not strive to depict a whole. Connections between these pathways are made by the various authors but can also be constituted by the reader itself. In short, both software studies and the Software Studies lexicon can be seen as a specific approach whereby each entry is a pathway into thinking about software.

This approach does not seem to have a shared methodology except for creating new pathways into software. This could be due to the different backgrounds of the authors who all contribute to the discourse of software studies from their own perspective and paradigm. This is both the strength and weakness of Software Studies: at times the lexicon seems uneven with an overemphasis on computing which is a neglected aspect of software according to Fuller. However, in order to bring back this neglected aspect too many entries fall in the lexicon back on Turing et. al.

Software Studies builds on Fuller’s previous works Behind the Blip and, to a lesser extent, Media Ecologies. Behind the Blip consists of several essays on the topic of the culture of software. In the opening essay of Behind the Blip Fuller argues for a “software criticism” that moves authors writing about computers away from the performance of software towards a more critical approach. This new critical approach is not concerned with detailing the functionality of a particular piece of software but is rather concerned with the question how software consists of different elements that are embedded in a dynamic web of relations.

An excellent example of this critical approach is the essay ‘It Looks Like You Are Writing A  Letter’ that critiques the popular word-processing software Microsoft Word revealing that “software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used.” Fuller argues that software can be seen as a synthesis, a form of amalgamation or assemblage, of different layers that do not imply a static whole. This dynamic synthesis is also the subject of Fuller’s book Media Ecologies that uses a materialistic approach to identify three forces of objects in media ecologies: affordances, material substrates and memes. In a sense, software is described as having a vitality; it derives its energy from these forces that cause collision, (dis)connection and interaction underwriting their unstable and dynamic nature.

Lev Manovich previously addressed the importance of studying software in The Language of New Media in 2001. He states that media have become programmable and that we need a new field of study to address the issues that arise from this turn in our culture. Not only has software quietly penetrated our daily life but it has also become invisible. The ubiquity and so-called transparency of software renders it invisible but at the same time it points out the importance of studying it. Manovich has studied software from a formalist approach by taking terms and categories from computer science and applying them to new media that have become programmable.  According to Manovich five principles distinguish new media from the older media  namely, numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding (27-48). These principles point to the relation that new media and software have with code.

Adrian Mackenzie takes issue with Manovich with an interesting take on code and software in Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (2006) and notes that software is a very mutable object that is entangled in a web of relations. Mackenzie sees software as a social object and process that is intrinsically linked to code as a material and practice. He points to the problems of Manovich’s formal analysis because it abstracts software from practices and contexts surrounding coding and reduces it to “relations and operations (such as sorting, comparing, copying, removing) on items of data.” (Mackenzie 2006) These relations and operations are seen as quite stable forms and are often directly transferred from the field of computer science. Instead of abstracting and formalizing software Mackenzie argues for an ontology of software that deals with its mutability. This mutability arises from the agential relations indexed by code of the social web that software weaves. Mackenzie, as one of the authors of the Software Studies lexicon, contributes to software studies by arguing that we should render software visible and notice the agency it provides, generates and distributes:

At stake here is an account of software as a highly involuted, historically media-specific distribution of agency. This account diverges from a general sociology of technology in highlighting the historical, material specificity of code as a labile, shifting nexus of relations, forms and practices. It regards software formally as a set of permutable distributions of agency between people, machines and contemporary symbolic environments carried as code. Code itself is structured as a distribution of agency. (Mackenzie, 19)

So what is next for the field of software studies? After having finished reading Software Studies it has not become quite clear what is to be done since it does not provide a unified approach or methodology. However, the lexicon is an excellent starting point for those who wish to be introduced into software studies. But what about those who wish to contribute? Even though a lexicon is provisional, scalable and offers pathways, in a printed form it still implies some kind of a finished whole. Software as a shifting nexus of relations is in a constant flux and pathways into software may disappear, change or be added. The print form is not fit to adjust to such changes because once the text has been printed there is no way to adjust it. Revising is a possible solution for this problem. Recently, the famous lexicon Keywords by Raymond Williams has been revised by several editors resulting in New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society. Original entries of the lexicon were updated and new entries were added twenty five years after the original publication.

A more fitting solution for Software Studies would be supplying a digital environment in which changes in entries can be made without losing the original entry and can be tracked. Such environments are currently known as wikis which might be an ideal work form for software studies. Like software, wikis are often seen as a shifting nexus of relations that contain provisional, scalable pathways into other topics. A wiki, or another hypertextual environment might render the different pathways into software and their connections more visible thus expanding the knowledge about software and its relations. To perceive a better understanding of software we need to create more pathways. Would software studies benefit from using software to create these pathways and write about its studies?

References

Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn, USA: Autonomedia, 2003.
Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. New York, USA: Peter Lang Pub Inc., 2006.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2002.

UPDATE
Matthew Fuller replied to my critique on the somewhat stale format of the book in contrast to a wiki that a wiki tends to homogenize the authors’ voices. On top of that academic publishing in the form of a book is a good way to ‘register’ ideas within a certain set of discourses embedded in the book. During the SoftWhere 2008: Software Studies Strategy Round-Table Doug Sery from MIT Press announced that they were interested in publishing a series and MIT Press officially approved the Software Studies book series in July 2008.

While I was in San Diego in May at the Software Studies Institute the first bits of a digital collaborative working ground were being built. The goal is to make a Software Studies portal where current research is on display, to find researchers and to bring researchers together. This portal is still “under construction” but anything tagged with ‘software_studies’ will very likely be picked up in the near future.

Warren Sack, Alexander Galloway, Greg Elmer and Anat Ben-David explore the contents of networks. The Summer Talks are hosted by Richard Rogers. The program is part of the 10-year Jubilee of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools for the Web. It is also part of the Digital Methods Summer School as well as the New Media Research Lecture Series, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

Monday, 11 August 2008, 1 – 5 pm
Location: Nina van Leer Zaal, Allard Pierson Museum, Oude Turfmarkt 129 (“Bijzondere Collecties” Entrance), Amsterdam.
Free entry, followed by drinks, 5 – 6.30pm

Digital Methods Summer Program Substance

Networked Content: Turning Away From the User
The Amsterdam Digital Summer program re-introduces the turn away from the user as content-organizing agent on the Web. Instead, it puts forward a device-centric approach to the study of what may be termed networked content. As valuable as the importation of fan studies has been in showing how a participatory culture gives rise to collective intelligence, it neglects what may be termed algorithmic consequences, that is, the manner in which content is delivered by devices in the first instance. The turn away from the user is at once a methodological as well as techno-epistemological program. Instead of placing video cameras over the users’ shoulders or affixing eye trackers, for example, a Web device diagnostics is preferred. How are the scanners, crawlers, scrapers and all other manner of content capturing devices changing the way Web effects are analysed? In engine critiques, the question remains which content is  served, when and where? In sphere critiques (websphere, blogosphere, newssphere, tagosphere), similarly the question concerns the distance of certain content from the surface, and how it may make itself known or hidden. For the new spaces, e.g., syndication and other feed arenas, content spread and coverage are under-interrogated.

Summer Talks I: Software Studies

Warren Sack
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
From the start, computer science has been concerned with automation, the means to replace people with machinery, in other words, to move people “out of the loop.” This is evident even in the founding, theoretical document of the field, where A.M. Turing (1936) states that his focus is on “automatic machines” which can run without intervention by an external, human operator. But, as computers and networks moved out of the lab and into homes, businesses and social spaces, software and hardware designers turned to social science – psychology, sociology and now, increasingly cultural anthropology – to understand the interface between people and machines and to rethink computers as a medium of communication between people. In its initial move to articulate a new field of study, computer science focused on machinery to the exclusion of people and has, subsequently, had to supplement its focus with ideas from social sciences to engage individuals, society, and most recently culture. Lucy Suchman’s (1987, 2007) pioneering work at Xerox PARC fundamentally changed computer science (especially artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction) to the extent that now most large, industry research labs (e.g., IBM, Intel, etc.) include cultural anthropologists. Bruno Latour and other Actor-Network Theorists have argued that social science has, unfortunately, tried to limit its scope to humans and exclude technology from its descriptions. In many ways, this is the converse of computer science’s opening move to leave people “out of the loop” in order to focus exclusively on technology. ANT opens social theory to technology both in its analysis and its vocabulary. Especially in newer manifestations, ANT redeploys the vocabularies of computer science to interrogate sociotechnical couplings (cf., Latour’s (2005a) usage of “object-oriented programming” and his extended analogy between web browser “plug-in” software and the circulation of subjectivity (Latour, 2005b)). So, “translation” (a la Callon and Latour) is happening in both directions: from computer science to science studies and back. This double translation constitutes a locus of activity in which computer science is executed as science studies and vice versa. The software of Richard Rogers, Andrei Mogoutov, and others in science studies demonstrates one aspect of this activity and the software of Phil Agre, Paul Dourish and others in computer science demonstrates another. Following new media theorists, I call this area of activity “software studies.” “Software studies” is a phrase coined by Lev Manovich in his book, The Language of New Media, and is the title of a recent collection edited by Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon. In this paper, I propose a definition of this emerging field of inquiry, software studies, and demonstrate some possibilities by using software I have written with colleagues and students over the past decade to summarize and visualize debates and discussions that take place in Open Source Software development efforts and in newsgroups and blogs devoted to politics and culture.

Summer Talks II: Alternative Algorithms (On Method)

Alexander Galloway
New York University, USA

It happens from time to time that a certain amount of reflection becomes necessary, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but as to the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology, which today has a distinctly liberal profile. With method, it is often more a question of suitability than existential correctness, often more a question of personal style than universal context. Hence methodological discussions these days often devolve into a sort of popularity contest. Who advocates what method and for what purpose? Which general equivalent trumps all others–is it race, or is it class, or is it the logos, or the archive, or the gaze, or desire, play, excess, singularity, resistance, or perhaps life itself–elevating one methodological formation above all others in a triumphant critique (to end all future critique)? In this paper I examine what sorts of methodological approaches make sense today, making the case that the proper methodological position for those working critically within techno-culture is the creation of alternative algorithms.

Summer Talks III: Code Politics: Networking through Traffic and Tags

Greg Elmer
Ryerson University-Infoscape Research Lab, Canada

This presentation provides an overview of the theory, tools, and methods developed as part of the three year SSHRC funded Code politics project housed at the Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University, Toronto. The presentation will review the scrapers, analytical tools, data sets and visualizations that were developed from three case studies: 1) a blog analysis tool underdevelopment for the forthcoming Canadian federal election, 2) a YouTube study of networked/embedded videos during the Australian federal election and 3) a study of political issues circulating on Facebook groups during the Ontario provincial election in 2007. The presentation concludes with a discussion of cross platform, networked forms of analysis that highlight both users and researchers abilities to map and perform politics in the webosphere.

Summer Talks IV: The promised Cyberland: Does the state of Palestine already exist on the Web?

Anat Ben-David
Science, Technology and Society Program, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Whilst the current status of Palestine is that of a “national authority”, “(occupied) territories”, but not a state, one can say that the state of Palestine already exists on the Web since March 2003, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delegated the dot.ps country code Top Level Domain, after the two-letter suffix was officially included in the U.N. list for recognized countries and territories (ISO3166-1). The official representation of Palestine on the Web was seen by many as entailing a great and unprecedented potential for creating a “promised cyberland”, an idealized and imagined cyberspace which will be used as a model for the anticipated state on the ground. In a complex geographic reality of unconnected Palestinian territories, and restraints put on Palestinians from physically contacting each other caused by derivatives of the Israeli occupation and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict such as the physical separation between Gaza and the West Bank, the Separation Wall, curfews and checkpoints, the Palestinian Web takes the discussion of the “imagined” in cyberspace beyond imagined communities and identities, to imagined places and geographies. Facilitated by ICTs, the Palestinian cyberstate bypasses the geographic reality on the ground and provides both continuously demarcated space and communication means for advancing public debate, polity, and establishment of the kind of statehood the anticipated Palestinian state wishes to realize on the ground. From a Web-studies and information politics perspectives, the .ps top level domain forms an unprecedented opportunity for studying relationships between the Web and the ground. Which is mirroring which? Which is anticipating which? Do they behave differently? This paper will describe an ongoing research project of the Palestinian Web as representing and anticipating Palestinian statehood, performed by Govcom.org in collaboration with the Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Programme. The various analyses examined different aspects of Palestinian statehood on the Web, touching on the physical vs. virtual location of Palestinian Websites, Palestinian politics, academia, civil society, etc. In an attempt to demarcate and characterize the Palestinian Web, we often asked what kind of project has the .ps Web become: who is coming to use the .ps domain?  If not demarcated by the .ps top level domain, where can the Palestinian Web be found, and how can it be defined?  After providing some answers to these questions, this paper concludes by discussing the unique contribution of Web studies and non-biased, automated internet-based tools in mapping politically sensitive issues such as the Palestinian case in particular, and asymmetric conflicts in general.

Acknowledgments
Digital Methods Summer acknowledges the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation’s Interregeling Fund. The Digital Methods Initiative is coordinated by Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede, PhD candidates, Media & Culture, University of Amsterdam. You can mail us at digitalmethods.net

Download the hi-resolution Quicktime movie from the SoftWhere08 website.

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Software-engine relations in the blogosphere

Thank you very much for inviting me. My name is Anne Helmond and I am currently a New Media Lecturer at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. I also work at the Institute of Network Cultures, an Amsterdam based media research center. I am focusing my current research on software-engine relations, analyzing the entanglement of the engines into software.

I would like to propose to redefine the current perception we have of the blogger because people might think of the blogger as a pajama clad revolutionary or the lonely writer who sits in the dark in his room. However, the blogger is an active researcher. One would have to admit that the main amount of this activity is engine based. A lot of research is done via engines, it is engine work.

Then one starts to think about engines and bloggers and how are the software-engine relations are build into the medium and practice of blogging. Then one would have to think about the engines:

1. What is missing from the current studies into software is the recognition of the central role that the engines play in blogging. How one actively blogs with the engines in mind.
2. And also increasingly how engines are playing a role in how the blog software is continually being optimized for the engines.
3. The engines have a particular idea of what the blogosphere is, namely that the blogosphere of the indexable which is posts.

Let’s examine these three points in reverse chronological order.

The blog software feeds the engines for the engines’ indexing and thereby creating what you might call a symbiotic relationship. In some specificity: The engines index the blogosphere through site feeds and ping. The WordPress default site feeds only syndicates the five most recent posts which reinforces the distinct unit of the post as the native format of the blog. Comments are offered in a separate feed and pages are not syndicated at all. What is the blogosphere? According to the engines, that what is indexible namely the five latest posts. The engines see the blogosphere as posts only. The blogroll, pages and comments are not part of the blogosphere as seen by engines. This means that the comments actually form a different part of the blogosphere, the commentosphere.

Blog standards have also enabled the engines to construct a blogosphere in which the bloggers are subject to a software-engine regime. The daily blogging practice brings users directly into the disarray of software-engine politics as illustrated in the case of spam and nofollow. The nofollow attribute as an example of the political implications of the software-engine relations on the blogosphere. Spam is one of the practices that exploit the software-engine relations within the blogosphere.

What is nofollow?

Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. (Wikipedia)

Nofollow is a default setting in all the major blog software and it is important because it is a visible intervention, unlike other indexing decisions, by the software makers and the search engines and not the blogger. It has an impact on the meaning and value of links and it influences ranking and indexing which is different per search engine.

Blog software is optimized for the engines. This symbiotic relationship between the software and the engines is not without consequences. The engines are increasingly entangled in both the medium and practice of blogs which has implications on several levels. The influence of the engines on the medium and practice of blogs asks for a critical examination of this relationship.

A WordPress blog notifies ping servers by default which means that a WordPress blog is almost automatically included in the engines. The relationship between the software and the engines is two-fold: the software embraces the engines and the engines embrace the protocols within the software. WordPress implicitly acknowledges this relationship by implementing features that connect to the engines but it also explicitly states that “WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines.” The default settings in WordPress, such as providing feeds and pinging the engines, feed your blog to the engines.

Google is seen as the entry point to the web. Google as the number one search engine is regarded by many to be “the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) and “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007). The main entry into the blogosphere is also provided by the engines which is why we need to critically examine their role. On top of that the different engines seem to create different blogospheres.

In a previous case study done with the Digital Methods Initiative of the University of Amsterdam we asked “To what extent do search engines not only map the blogosphere but also construct it?” Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati all construct different parts of the blogosphere with a small overlap.The engines seem to segregate the web by demarcating different web spheres, for example the blogosphere, the newssphere and the tag-o-sphere and different blogospheres.

By using the RSS protocol for indexing the engines duplicate the distinction between blog posts and other blog content and segregate the web by just indexing posts. According to Google blog search the blogosphere consists of blog posts. The question is whether software-engine relations contribute to the
construction of different web spheres?

The blog is not a closed environment but a dynamic entity due to its dispersive nature. This graphic by Wired Magazine illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the blogger, blog software and the engines.

So my research concerns the radical idea that bloggers do not so much blog for a public, but for engines, with the aid of blog software.

Day two of SoftWhere 2008 was an invite-only strategy round-table session that aimed to address several questions on the formation of a new field of studies.

What is Software Studies?
Is it an intellectual movement, a paradigm, a school or field? According to the Software Studies Initiative directors Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin it is whatever we want it to be. It is what it is already but it is now getting an official name with the recently published book. The Software Studies lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, is coming out with MIT Press this month and marks a milestone in the field. Unfortunately Matthew Fuller, from Goldsmiths College, University of London was not able to attend to attend the meeting in California but the people present represented a wide variety of interests.

MIT Press was represented by Doug Sery who is involved with the MIT Software Studies series. Through these series MIT wishes to direct the discussion and with their Platform Studies series they want to provide a complementary insight into the field of computing, software and hardware. One of the questions that arises is where is the place of webware? Does it belong to platform studies or software studies? Another issue that we need to address is how we can use, create and learn from new modes of knowledge formation that go beyond books. How do we make, use and contribute to the growing field of software studies besides the official MIT series?

The Software Studies Initiative presented their first plan on establishing a central platform for researchers, students, engineers and everyone interested in the state of software studies. One way to accomplish this is to form an aggregation channel where everything produced will be aggregated in one central place. This may be done by using the “software_studies” tag when publishing your related work on Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, blogs, etc. We are participating in the discourse by tagging which in itself is a technological strategy. The tools we use as both an object of study and to document our studies are going to be very diverse and on top of that we are people who switch tools often. This is why tagging was chosen as one of the main ways to aggregate content because tagging is a meta practice and usually independent of the type of tool. A first aggregation prototype was made by Jeremy Douglass in Yahoo Pipes.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin (l) and Jeremy Douglass (r): Software Studies Workshop at UCSD

However, when tagging “user generated content” such as blog posts or videos one has to be aware of the both the tag and the field. As a fairly new and emerging field that is in the process of shaping itself there will be a lot of people doing interesting research related to a field they are not aware of. I think one of the key objects should also be expanding the awareness of the field where the Software Studies lexicon is playing a leading role.

From left to right: Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost, William Humberto Huber, Lev Manovich: Software Studies Workshop at UCSD

An important step in further shaping and expanding the field is an international approach. The first Software Studies Workshop was held at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 2006. This second workshop at the University of San Diego attracted mostly people from the United States from UCSD & UCSC but also people from MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Maryland, etc. International representation included Tristan Thielmann from the University of Siegen, Germany, Cicero Silva from FILE, Brazil and myself. Silva recently opened the Software Studies Brazil at the FILE lab and translated a section of the Software Studies Portal into Portugese.

With the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the University of Amsterdam and the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, Goldsmiths College in London a European branch is unofficially present as well. It would be interesting to see what is happing in Scandinavia, Germany, Italy and Spain for example. Another interesting direction to explore would be China but due to language and cultural barriers this may be a step too far too soon.

The main communal feature of this group is technical engagement. This also raised the reoccurring question of digital literacy or, should we all know (and teach) how to program? Personally I do not consider myself a coder. I once called myself a passive coder as a way to illustrate that I can read bits of code and write new code through the practice of copy and pasting but I am not an active coder in the sense that I can write code from scratch. In this age of appropriation, copy-pasting I think it is important to know your object of study, which in the case of software will often involve knowing code, but interpreting code and writing code are two different things. Digital literacy to me means to understand code, not to be able to produce code (although I wish I could but that is another issue.)

A final question that was addressed in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) meeting room was that we are located in the heart of where things get made. In California a lot of the objects we study gets made and how do we establish relations with for example Google and Yahoo? How do we establish more open and fluid relations with those who produce our objects of study?

The University of California in San Diego (UCSD) organized a two day event in order to pioneer the emerging field of Software Studies. The first day was a public event titled SoftWhere 2008 which consisted of over fifteen short presentation in Pecha Kucha style. The second day consisted of a closed strategic session that dealt with more formal questions on the shaping of a new field of studies and will be discussed in a follow-up blog post.

SoftWhere 2008
The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere!

The Software Studies workshop was organized by UCSD and most of the participants were either from the University of California in San Diego or Irvine or Los Angeles. Participants were asked to prepare a short presentation preferably in Pecha Kucha style. Jeremy Douglass, the first Software Studies Initiative postdoc, was strictly timing our presentations as each of us had either exactly seven minutes or if you followed the Pecha Kucha style of 20 seconds for 20 slides six minutes and fourty seconds. It turned out to be a great format to listen to almost twenty presentations in just one afternoon. Douglass was a great timekeeper, or rather his iPhone stopwatch that made an alarming sound after seven minutes forcing some speakers to cut their story short. In Jeremy’s own apologetic words: “It’s not me, it’s the software.” The presentations showed the diverse perspectives on software and software culture. The diversity of approaches and topics in the research may serve as an intellectual map of the people present. They may also serve to determine a common ground in the extremely diverse approaches to software studies. Liz Losh from Virtualpolitik wrote an extensive post on the “speed dating” Pecha Kucha presentations. Critical storage studies The presentations showed the diverse approaches to studying software and they also served as a showcase of the current state of research into software. However, some presentations did not deal with studies of software itself but also with the questions surrounding the field of software studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum for example talked about preservation as software studies, or what he would jokingly refer to as critical storage studies. Critical X Studies is a term used by Bill Benzon who at first was skeptical about the new field of Critical Code Studies: “While I tend to be skeptical of any enterprise whose name takes the form “Critical X Studies,” where X is the domain under investigation, there’s certainly room to look at the cultural production of computer code and the styles of computer languages and programs.”

What Kirschenbaum is referring to with critical storage studies is the fact that without preservation there is no field. If we want to establish and maintain a new field of Software Studies we should also look at the preservation of software. Emulators are only one way of thinking about storage and keeping software ‘alive’ because we are dealing with a hybrid cultural heritage. This is illustrated ‘the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project‘ that Kirschenbaum is currently working on. Taxonomy of Software Studies Critical Code Studies is just one of the many fields bordering or moving into the field of Software Studies. Mark Marino presented the pitfalls embodied within the metaphor of Critical X Studies as described by Liz Losh. However, these different fields that at some points overlap and form different layers of software form the grounds of Bogost’s taxonomy of Software Studies consisting of five levels:

1. Reception/operation
2. Interface
3. Form/function
4. Code
5. Platform

While this is not a definite taxonomy of the field it does present a useful way to think of how the existing overlapping fields operate. In this taxonomy Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s new book series Platform Studies is seen as complimentary to Software Studies. We are approaching different layers of software through both a philosophical and critical practice that may entail either the study of code or the other things (cultural studies). Part of software studies itself is turning it inside-out:

What are we looking at if we study software? Which layers do we need to address and which questions and fields have previously addressed similar issues? These questions were part of the second day of the Software Studies workshop which dealt with the typical What, Where, When and How questions and will be addressed in a next post. This is the first post in a series on the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD and the Software Studies Panel at the HASTAC II Conference at UCI and UCLA. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with updates. This post was originally written for the Institute of Network Cultures who made it possible for me to attend the workshop in San Diego, CA, USA.

The Institute of Network Cultures is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam).