History
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 Friedrich Kittler's essay, "Es gibt keine Software," Lev Manovich's Language of New Media, and Matthew Fuller's Behind the Blip: Essays on the culture of software. 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.
The first conference events in the emerging field were Software Studies Workshop 2006 and SoftWhere 2008.
In 2008, MIT Press launched a Software Studies book series with an edited volume of essays (Matthew Fuller's "Software Studies: a Lexicon"), and the first academic program was launched, (Lev Manovich, Benjamin H. Bratton and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's "Software Studies Initiative" at U. California San Diego).
In 2011, a number of mainly British researchers established Computational Culture, an open-access peer-reviewed journal. The journal provides a platform for "inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of the culture of computational objects, practices, processes and structures."
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