How an Academic Companion Website Makes Media-Specific Arguments

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. Differences in media materialities produce different content and meaning. N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of “media-specific analysis” has become a staple in the study of creative digital artifacts, which she posits to “explore the dynamic interaction between the artifactual characteristics and the interpretation that materiality embodies.” Hayles conceives of mediaspecific analysis to interrogate the materiality of literary hypertext. Its print and digital manifestations make it ideal for her to analyze the specificity of the electronic hypertext. Although increasingly commonplace in the study of creative works, a parallel for the study of multimodal academic texts is still in the evolution phase. Comparable to hypertext’s print and digital manifestations, print books can have digital companion websites as counterparts. Unlike hypertexts, these print and digital counterparts usually complement each other in one project. In reviewing academic texts, we take media-specific analysis to a higher level by investigating the effects of media-specificity on the intellectual intervention of the book project. Just as Hayles argues that part of the meaning of a hypertext is in the links between textual nodes, so can a companion website make arguments by its content as well as its structure. For this review, then, my overarching interrogation is, how does the companion website reflect, amplify, and contradict the arguments made in the book?