The series editors:
Matthew Fuller | cus01mf@gold. ac.uk
Noah Wardrip-Fruin | noah@noahwf.com
Lev Manovich | manovich.lev@gmail.com
A number of books are already on the way. If you planning a book which you think belongs to Software Studies, get in touch with one of the series editors.
---------
Software takes part in, shapes and makes possible almost every aspect of
contemporary life. But whilst much is written about how software is used,
and the cultural, economic and social activities that go on around and
through it, thinking about software itself remains largely technical.
Increasingly however, artists, scientists, engineers, hackers, designers
and scholars in the humanities and sciences are finding that for the
questions they face, and the things they need to build, an expanded
understanding of software is necessary. For such understanding they can
call upon relatively marginal texts in the history of computing and new
media, they can take part in the rich implicit culture of software, and
they can also take part in the development of an emerging, fundamentally
transdisciplinary, computational literacy.
Software Studies uses and develops cultural and theoretical approaches to
make critical and speculative accounts of the objects and processes of
computer science. The field tracks the way in which software is so
substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and
society, reformulating processes, ideas, institutions and cultural objects
around their closeness to algorithmic and formal description and actuation.
Software Studies proposes histories of computational cultures and works
with the rich intellectual resources of computing to develop reflexive
thinking about its entanglements and possibilities.
The Software Studies book series, published by the MIT Press, aims to
publish the best new work in a critical and experimental field that is at
once culturally and technically literate, reflecting the reality of today's
software culture.
- Matthew Fuller, September 13, 2008.