Thursday, December 15, 2011

The first proper academic reviews of our MIT Press book Code/Space are beginning to appear in journals. There is comprehensive review by Mike Batty in new journal Computational Culture, where he concludes that "Code/space presents an ambitious road map for the way we should begin to understand spatialities – spaces which are being continually transformed by functions based on software processing information. This is one of the first statements of a new approach to understanding space in terms of a world where information is accessible anywhere, any time, and Kitchin and Dodge provide critical structures for understanding how such space can be as differentiated and variegated as the spaces of the past."

Next is an insightful review by Taylor Shelton in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, in which he says:

"As the first book-length treatment of these issues, Code/Space is an important contribution not only to human geography but also to software studies and the social study of technology more broadly. In reorienting the geographic study of technology away from the potentially deterministic ascriptions of agency to technology and toward the various elements and processes that are constitutive of the technologies under scrutiny, Code/Space opens up new avenues for investigating the contingency of the relationship among society, space, and technology."

However, Shelton is rather more critical about our often 'negative' reading of the power of software and also out tendency to (re)invent terminology that confuses rather than clarifies the arguments.

I've also heard from the editorial staff at MIT Press that the first printing of the book is selling out and they want to order a reprint.

Lastly, I noticed that Code/Space gets a mention in the (newish?) Wikipedia entry on 'Software Studies'.

1 Comments:

Blogger Anika said...

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