Software studies is an emerging interdisciplinary research field, which studies software systems and their social and cultural effects.
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Software is interwoven into all dimensions of our contemporary life—the economic, the political, and the cultural—in both obvious and nearly imperceptible ways. It is the underlying layer that drives much of our industry, our cultural production and consumption, and our communication and social organization. Many recently developed areas of study, such as cyberculture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture, which have positioned themselves alongside software's increasing realm of influence, have theorized about nearly every aspect of software's implementation. Yet, software itself is rarely addressed as a distinct theoretical category to be studied. This is precisely where software studies begins.
As an interdisciplinary field of study, software studies draws upon methods and theory from the digital humanities and more traditionally computational perspectives on software to build approaches to understanding software as both technical artifact and as an object of study. While software studies approaches are often unlike the approaches of computer science or software engineering, which concern themselves primarily with software in information theory and in practical application, these fields all share emphasis on computer literacy, particularly in the areas of programming and source code. This emphasis on analyzing software sources and processes (rather than simply interfaces) often distinguishes software studies from academic studies of new media, which are usually restricted to discussions of interfaces and observable effects.
Recent firsts include the first published volume of essays (Matthew Fuller's "Software Studies: a Lexicon"),[1] the first academic program (Lev Manovich, Benjamin H. Bratton and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's "Software Studies Initiative" at U. California San Diego),[2] and the first conference events (Software Studies Workshop 2006 and SoftWhere 2008).[3][4]
In 2008 The MIT Press started a Software Studies book series. The already published books include Software Studies: A Lexicon edited by Fuller (2008), Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Wardrip-Fruin (2009), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2011), and Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (2011).
In 2011, a number of UK researchers established Computational Culture, an open-access peer-reviewed journal. The journal will provide a platform for software studies field and related approaches.
The conceptual origins of software studies include Marshall McLuhan's focus on the role of media in themselves, rather than the content of media platforms, in shaping culture. Early references to the study of software as a cultural practice appear in Matthew Fuller's 'Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software'[5]Lev Manovich's Language of New Media[6] and Friedrich Kittler's essay, "Es gibt keine Software."[7] Much of the impetus for the development of software studies has come from videogame studies, particularly platform studies, the study of videogames and other software artifacts in their hardware and software contexts. New media art, software art, motion graphics, and computer-aided design are also significant software-based cultural practices, as is the creation of new protocols and platforms.
Software studies is closely related to a number of other emergent fields in the digital humanities that explore functional components of technology from a social and cultural perspective. Software studies' focus is at the level of the entire program, specifically the relationship between interface and code. Notably related are critical code studies, which is more closely attuned to the code rather than the program, and platform studies, which investigates the relationships between hardware and software.