Doug Reside is associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky and undergraduate degrees in English and Computer Science from Truman State University. His current projects include the Open Annotation Collaboration, and a book on the technologies that produce musical theatre.
This is the source
The need for greater software literacy is a pressing problem, but one still not universally acknowledged even among those working in new media and digital humanities. In
Wardrip-Fruin's
Although Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s
This approach to studying software by looking not at the actual lines of C++, Lisp,
or JavaScript code but at the general algorithm (abstracted to a level even above
what computer scientists and programmers describe as pseudo-code) is what
Wardrip-Fruin means by his titular phrase, expression
of the
algorithm) as well as at the process
(the algorithm itself) that generated
it. Wardrip-Fruin builds upon the foundation laid by Lev Manovich, who, in his 2002
book
the specific text of codewritten by developers).
games.That the first real example of a software studies approach comes out of game studies is both to be expected and (somewhat) regretted. On one hand, games of the sort Wardrip-Fruin examines are a medium for storytelling and character creation, and as such are natural extensions of the work of previous literary and media studies scholars and thereby set up a convenient space for humanities scholars and teachers to consider the important cultural and technical issues raised by Wardrip-Fruin in an environment more familiar than, for instance, an analysis of the software that drives Walmart (one of Wardrip-Fruin’s suggestions for another work of software studies scholarship). Unfortunately, like graphic novels and musical theater, the genre is still too easily dismissed as popular entertainment by too many of those who most need to hear Wardrip-Fruin’s arguments. This is not really the fault of the book, but I do question the wisdom of selecting, as early as chapter 2, such an exceptionally
geekytitle as
Even to sympathetic audiences, the transposition of the multimedia experience of a modern computer game to text can, almost inevitably, generate potentially confusing prose that spends as much time describing as it does analyzing; the small black and white screenshots do less to illustrate the author’s point than they do to highlight the limitations of the print monograph for scholarly discussion in the modern age. For this reason, Wardrip-Fruin’s discussion of relatively simple, text-based programs (such as the opening chapter’s analysis of
Still, there truly is treasure buried in this land of geekdom, and not just a few
nuggets, but enough to lay the foundation of an entirely new scholarly approach for
the digital humanities. Like Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s work on Platform
Studies, Wardrip-Fruin demonstrates by way of example a new way of reading new
media. If Manovich drew the map, Wardrip-Fruin has opened the mine, and what may be
extracted will benefit not only those working in digital humanities or new media but
scholars across the curriculum. In the fifth and sixth chapters, Wardrip-Fruin
makes a compelling case that software studies as a field is not only an interesting
avenue of research for new media specialists but also should increasingly be a basic
activity of educated citizens in a 21st century democracy. Wardrip-Fruin eloquently
illustrates how the contemporary human experience is, in large part, shaped by the
algorithmic processes that drive our society, algorithms that determine, as
Wardrip-Fruin observes, everything from what Amazon.com recommends that one buy next
to whether one is included in a terrorist watch list. To the degree that the sort
of algorithmic literacy practiced by software studies is anything less than
universal there will be, in the words of Ted Nelson whom Wardrip-Fruin quotes, a
digital priesthood
that rules over the rest of the populace with power that
cannot be questioned or criticized. The power of
legible examplesfrom which the educated reader can reason by analogy to understand how larger, more powerful, and generally closed-source algorithmic processes function, and concomitantly, question them.
It is on these points that I find myself citing this book most frequently. The need
for greater software literacy is a pressing problem for all of the reasons
Wardrip-Fruin enumerates, but one still not universally acknowledged even among
those working in new media and digital humanities. In too many digital humanities
projects, scholars simply hire programmers to do expression
they desire operate. Immediate consequences of this approach include rampant scope creep (because the effects changes to the expression
have on the underlying processes
are not well understood by the project director) and the tendency for projects to fade away after initial funding runs out. (If a scholar does not have the technical ability to maintain her own work, it is in danger of vanishing when the tithe can no longer be paid to the priest.
) If even the community of Ph.D. holding, multi-lingual digital humanities scholars is not expected to understand the technical underpinnings of the work for which they are often the leader of record, the hope of a software literate populace seems very far away indeed. The usual objections about lack of time express nothing so much as a lack of incentives, experienced as keenly by the assistant professor seeking tenure as by the English major just beginning his freshman year. Until granting agencies, hiring and tenure committees, and peer review panels reject as unqualified anyone without demonstrated software literacy, we cannot hope for a world in which the citizenry are able to evaluate whether or not the risks of false positives in a particular terrorist watch list generator outweigh the potential for increased national security.
At some level even the approach advocated in
legible exampleswithout the ability to actually read code (something Wardrip-Fruin clearly can do). Of course, one can rely on others to do this first level interpretive work, but here the metaphor of the priest can be employed again, and arguably even more aptly than before. Perhaps programming knowledge is not a prerequisite for reading a monograph that follows the expressive processing approach (indeed, this book proves that it is not), but it seems that it must be a prerequisite to write one. Still, Wardrip-Fruin’s approach does seem well-suited for this transitional moment before widespread software literacy is achieved, and to the extent that expressive processing (the approach) and