How an Academic Companion Website Makes Media-Specific Arguments

In this project review, I discuss the companion website criticalcodestudies.com in relation to Mark C. Marino’s book Critical Code Studies (2020). Over the past decades, companion websites have become a small but persistently growing genre in academia, with products ranging from paratextual records to publications in their own right. The Critical Code Studies companion website makes excellent use of content and design to make media-specific arguments that interrogate the research subject, foregrounding a method that oscillates between close reading and contextual reading as well as promotes personal and communal reading practices. The combination of book and companion website successfully makes intellectual interventions into the case studies but also into our conception of source code in general. I review how the companion website reflects, amplifies, and contradicts the arguments made in the book.

(Author abstract)