Viola Lasmana (University of Southern California) provides a summary of the recently completed, month-long Critical Code Studies Working Group, an online discussion group based at the University of Southern California seeking to apply “humanities hermeneutics to the interpretation of the extra-functional significance of computer source code.” The first week of discussion centered around exploratory programming, “a form of computing that is flexible, unpredictable, does not require expert programming skills, and iterative, always in a process of revision.” The second week focused on feminist programming and sought to answer the questions, “What is feminist code? What is feminist coding?”
Jacqueline Wernimont (Scripps College), was a participant and commented:
[T]here is something generative in allowing the absent-presence of feminist executable code to operate as an irritant, an occasion to continue to question the structures that have not permitted such a thing to exist.
Lasmana will soon post the highlights of weeks three and four, which focused on “PostColonial CritCode: Coding in Global Englishes” and “ACLS Workbench Collaborative Reading.”
