Code, scholarship, and criticism: When is code scholarship and when is it not?

What is the scholarly nature of code and how do we evaluate the scholarship involved with coding? Our claim is that the humanities need an urgent answer to these questions given the increasing softwarization of both society and scholarship that pushes the boundaries of the methods and objects of study of the humanities. We argue that, as a result, there is a need to develop code criticism as a critical and reflexive tool within the humanities. Code criticism is described and positioned with respect to critical code studies, textual criticism, literary criticism, tool, and interface critique. Finally we outline an approach to code criticism based on ideas of reciprocal inquiry and of a continuum of literacies that connects code, code criticism, textual criticism, and literature.