This born-digital article examines the multimodal academic publication Pathfinders (Moulthrop and Grigar). Through a combination of interviews with readers and the author, textual analysis of the book, and literature review of Scalar, I trace the affordances of the platform, appropriation by scholars, the media text, and readership of Pathfinders. I distill themes that are key in the multimodality of the book, including platform adoption, institutional embedding, technological context and research values. Throughout the article, which is also written on Scalar, I reflect on my own use of Scalar and the various considerations that come with it in terms of software sustainability, accessibility, and transparency of research context. I conclude with a reflection on the media specificity of Scalar as an academic platform.
In this digital project review, I discuss the companion website CriticalCodeStudies.com in relation to Mark C. Marino's book Critical Code Studies (2020). Over the past decades, companion websites have become a small but persistently growing genre in academe, with products ranging from paratextual records to publications in their own right. The Critical Code Studies companion website makes excellent use of content and design to make mediaspecific arguments that interrogate the research subject, foregrounding a method that oscillates between close reading and contextual reading as well as promotes personal and communal reading practices. The combination of book and companion website successfully makes intellectual interventions not only into the case studies but also into our conception of source code in general. I review how the companion website reflects, amplifies, and contradicts the arguments made in the book.
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