The Software Studies initiative at UCSD is pleased to welcome our new Postdoctoral Researcher, Jeremy Douglass. Jeremy will be researching critical approaches to software and code using the analytic frameworks of the humanities and the social sciences, working on software projects for analyzing (software) culture, and playing a key role in field-building activities for software studies worldwide.Jeremy is appointed to Software Studies with support from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He will be working with Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Assistant Professor, Communication) to develop models and tools for the cultural criticism of software, establish the field as a complement to existing research in cyberculture and new media, and investigate how next generation cyberinfrastructure technologies can be used by humanists, social scientists, and cultural practitioners.
Jeremy arrives with a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara's Department of English. His dissertation, "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media," explores several critical techniques of interest to the software studies field, including the ongoing influence of code and development tools on software genre formation and the use of close-reading techniques on source code. In addition to a history of publications and presentations on electronic literature and software, he creates visualization artworks and writes for the new media art blog Writer Response Theory.