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1. Comments on Comments in Code

   Where in source code do we locate the "extra-functional significance" that Critical Code Studies calls us to critique? One starting point is in code comments. In most programming languages, comments are simple marks that set aside text for humans to read but computers to ignore. The act of "commenting" and "uncommenting" circulates this text into and out of the code per se, which is to say into and out of the purview of the compiler / interpreter. Like footnotes or endnotes, code comments are paratexts — continuous with and yet set apart from the source. Where they serve as actual *commentaries*, these paratexts enabling programmers to signal intentions, record histories, and render aesthetic judgements: comments enable the vital processes of software development culture.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 07.07.2012 - 22:36

2. Über Literatur und Digitalcode / Digital Code and Literary Text

   "This paper is based on the general (yet disputable) assumption that the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted, just as the poetic practices it is shaped after, from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as "hypertext'', "hyperfiction'', "hyper-/ multimedia'') towards paying attention to the very codedness - i.e. textuality - of digital systems themselves."

   Original text by Florian Cramer, retrieved from https://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/digital_code_and_literary_text.html

    

   Johannes Auer - 05.11.2012 - 22:23

3. Writing the World: Toward a Systems Approach to E-Writing

   Code – The Language of Our Time, new media poetics, and p0es1s. The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, are three widely regarded collections dealing with e-writing and its code from a humanist perspective. As an indication of how emergent this field of study is, in the several essays and papers that treat computer program code in these works, almost no actual code is presented for analysis or as concrete examples of the abstractions that their authors discuss.

   This is altogether understandable. There was no aesthetic arc hovering over and guiding the transition from legacy print writing to e-writing. In fact there was virtually no transition. Ewriting was suddenly there (here). And its foundation, program code, was an immediate fact that few students of literature had been trained to understand. Before they could, a framework had to be built within which this new literature, whose tools of craft are so obscure and esoteric, could be reasoned about and judged. Program code problematizes literary study at its very essence—at the act of creation.

   Scott Rettberg - 30.01.2013 - 21:39

4. From Grid to Rhizome: a Rethinking of a Layout Arrangement of the Post-digital Text

   In this paper we deal with the necessity of a post-digital text layout rethinking. Such layout differs from a layout of a printed text, because a post-digital medium is based on different principles from a traditional codex book. Arrangement of a layout in case of printed text, also in case of (post)digital text, is often based on the grid model. The alternative arrangement was specified as experimental forms. To go back in history, the grid model comes from cognitive preferences of a western reader and conforms to the principles that we follow in Gestalt psychology. These are the aesthetic references of typographical analysis of Modern movement, which was based on the golden rule principle and its application in the rectangular grid. The idea of grid followed Cartesian measurement of a codex page. According to Design Dictionary (2008) layout is often based on a design grid. Also Ellen Lupton (2010), and other authors described the model of a grid layout as a complex system applicable for every kind of media, so for the (post)digital media as well. In contraposition to the grid model we use arguments based on post-digital text and post-digital media analysis.

   Vian Rasheed - 11.11.2019 - 23:55

5. ‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound

   “He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.

   Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11