Critical Code Studies

Critical Code Studies PDF Author: Mark C. Marino
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262357437
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
An argument that we must read code for more than what it does—we must consider what it means. Computer source code has become part of popular discourse. Code is read not only by programmers but by lawyers, artists, pundits, reporters, political activists, and literary scholars; it is used in political debate, works of art, popular entertainment, and historical accounts. In this book, Mark Marino argues that code means more than merely what it does; we must also consider what it means. We need to learn to read code critically. Marino presents a series of case studies—ranging from the Climategate scandal to a hactivist art project on the US-Mexico border—as lessons in critical code reading. Marino shows how, in the process of its circulation, the meaning of code changes beyond its functional role to include connotations and implications, opening it up to interpretation and inference—and misinterpretation and reappropriation. The Climategate controversy, for example, stemmed from a misreading of a bit of placeholder code as a “smoking gun” that supposedly proved fabrication of climate data. A poetry generator created by Nick Montfort was remixed and reimagined by other poets, and subject to literary interpretation. Each case study begins by presenting a small and self-contained passage of code—by coders as disparate as programming pioneer Grace Hopper and philosopher Friedrich Kittler—and an accessible explanation of its context and functioning. Marino then explores its extra-functional significance, demonstrating a variety of interpretive approaches.

Critical Code Studies

Critical Code Studies PDF Author: Mark C. Marino
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262357437
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
An argument that we must read code for more than what it does—we must consider what it means. Computer source code has become part of popular discourse. Code is read not only by programmers but by lawyers, artists, pundits, reporters, political activists, and literary scholars; it is used in political debate, works of art, popular entertainment, and historical accounts. In this book, Mark Marino argues that code means more than merely what it does; we must also consider what it means. We need to learn to read code critically. Marino presents a series of case studies—ranging from the Climategate scandal to a hactivist art project on the US-Mexico border—as lessons in critical code reading. Marino shows how, in the process of its circulation, the meaning of code changes beyond its functional role to include connotations and implications, opening it up to interpretation and inference—and misinterpretation and reappropriation. The Climategate controversy, for example, stemmed from a misreading of a bit of placeholder code as a “smoking gun” that supposedly proved fabrication of climate data. A poetry generator created by Nick Montfort was remixed and reimagined by other poets, and subject to literary interpretation. Each case study begins by presenting a small and self-contained passage of code—by coders as disparate as programming pioneer Grace Hopper and philosopher Friedrich Kittler—and an accessible explanation of its context and functioning. Marino then explores its extra-functional significance, demonstrating a variety of interpretive approaches.

Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures

Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures PDF Author: Raúl Homero Villa
Publisher: Special Issue of American Quar
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This special issue of American Quarterly focuses on Los Angeles as an emblematic site through which the scholarship of American studies can be examined. As a city shaped by eighteenth-century European colonization, nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, and twentieth-century migration, Los Angeles has come to embody both the hopes and fears of Americans looking to the future. It is a city in which the local is deployed in complex practices of identity and community formation within the broader networks of globalization that continue to define and redefine what constitutes America. The articles in this volume address the complexities of the city's social geography across time, particularly since World War II. The collection reflects an exciting variety of cultural studies perspectives and reveals the synergistic possibilities of current Los Angeles studies and American studies in general. American Quarterly includes interdisciplinary scholarship that engages key issues in American studies. Publishing essays that examine American societies and cultures in global and local contexts, the journal contributes to the understanding of the United States, its diversity, and its impact on world politics and culture.

The American Quarterly Register and Magazine

The American Quarterly Register and Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Alternative Contact

Alternative Contact PDF Author: Paul Lai
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421400600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Responding to the recent indigenous turn in American studies, the essays in this volume inform discussion about indigeneity, race, gender, modernity, nation, state power, and globalization in interdisciplinary and broadly comparative global ways. Organized into three thematic sections—Spaces of the Pacific, “Unexpected Indigenous” Modernity, and Nation and Nation-State—Alternative Contact reveals how Native American studies and empowerment movements in the 1960s and 1970s decentered paradigms of Native American–European “first contact.” Among other kinds of contact, the contributors also imagine alternative connections between indigenous and American studies. The subject of United States military and government hegemony has long overshadowed discussions of contact with peoples of other origins. The articles in this volume explore transnational and cross-ethnic exchanges among indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Such moments of alternative contact complicate and enrich our understanding of the links between sovereignty, racial formation, and U.S. colonial and imperial projects. Ultimately, Alternative Contact theorizes a more dynamic indigeneity that articulates new or overlooked connections among peoples, histories, cultures, and critical discourses within a global context.

Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration PDF Author: Doran Larson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration works from the premise that if the law establishes and maintains both its practical and symbolic authority on the basis of its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence and the suffering threatened and delivered by such violence, then we cannot know the full human cost or concrete moral status of any legal state without human witness to the depth and manner of suffering meted out by such violence. The prison writer stands in the position to offer such witness. The prison writer knows the law’s violence in the flesh. For every other writer, reflection upon the degree and manner of suffering meted out under legal sanction—that is, reflection upon the full human cost of the contemporary legal order—is necessarily speculative. In close readings of first-person witness from prisons in the U.S., Ireland, and Africa, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration discovers literary tropes that chart at once local, national, and transnational conditions of carceral experience—the extant conditions of legalized suffering. In exhibiting the labor required to move from institutionalized abjection to the minimum requirements of rights-bearing personhood, this witness offers the sole credible vision of the possubility of a post carceral understanding of freedom.

Rewiring the "Nation"

Rewiring the Author: Carolyn de la Peña
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
This special bound issue of American Quarterly offers a re-reading of the narrative of U.S. technologies as we move beyond celebrations of exceptional tinkerers and a deterministic machine-driven sense of progress to a more complex understanding of the opportunities and responsibilities that befall a nation that interweaves its identities, labors, and creative cultures with its machines.

American Quarterly Register and Magazine

American Quarterly Register and Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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The American Quarterly Review

The American Quarterly Review PDF Author: Robert Walsh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Serial publications
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Enchanted America

Enchanted America PDF Author: J. Eric Oliver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657864X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
America is in civic chaos, its politics rife with conspiracy theories and false information. Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the rise, while scientists, universities, and news organizations are viewed with increasing mistrust. Its citizens reject scientific evidence on climate change and vaccinations while embracing myths of impending apocalypse. And then there is Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who won the support of millions of conservative Christians despite having no moral or political convictions. What is going on? The answer, according to J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, can be found in the most important force shaping American politics today: human intuition. Much of what seems to be irrational in American politics arises from the growing divide in how its citizens make sense of the world. On one side are rationalists. They use science and reason to understand reality. On the other side are intuitionists. They rely on gut feelings and instincts as their guide to the world. Intuitionists believe in ghosts and End Times prophecies. They embrace conspiracy theories, disbelieve experts, and distrust the media. They are stridently nationalistic and deeply authoritarian in their outlook. And they are the most enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. The primary reason why Trump captured the presidency was that he spoke about politics in a way that resonated with how Intuitionists perceive the world. The Intuitionist divide has also become a threat to the American way of life. A generation ago, intuitionists were dispersed across the political spectrum, when most Americans believed in both God and science. Today, intuitionism is ideologically tilted toward the political right. Modern conservatism has become an Intuitionist movement, defined by conspiracy theories, strident nationalism, and hostility to basic civic norms. Enchanted America is a clarion call to rationalists of all political persuasions to reach beyond the minority and speak to intuitionists in a way they understand. The values and principles that define American democracy are at stake.

American Quarterly Review

American Quarterly Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description