Switching Codes

"[This book] covers enough ground via specific examples to demonstrate the complex challenges and changes that the digital humanities currently offers to traditional ways of perceiving, thinking, and doing."

-- "Choice"

"At a moment when culture's digital makeover seems to have induced epistemological vertigo in many, Switching Codes offers a timely and well-targeted intervention. This book practices what it preaches, provoking cross-disciplinary dialogue and challenging the staid form of the usual essay collection, offering instead an engaging set of critical texts, poetry, fiction, games, and responses. Bartscherer, Coover, and their authors take up the challenges posed by the digital arts and humanities, mapping their new contexts, defining their analytic repertoire, and compelling a fresh set of insights. More than a portrait of our times, Switching Codes exemplifies the very logics that it explicates."

--William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Switching Codes . . . offers curious minds an intriguing set of entry points into probing the sensibilities behind this shift, permitting outsiders and insiders alike to assess what happens when knowledge creation occurs through interdisciplinary encounters among artists, humanists, and IT specialists. . . . The project essays and the critiques are each carefully wrought and thoughtfully considered, and they provide ample material for theoretical and methodological reflection, repaying close analysis and re-reading. . . . Each of these interleavings is worth opening up the book--perhaps indicating the benefits of experimenting even further with tried-and-true academic genres in an age of information innovation."-- "Technology and Culture"
"Unique and valuable. . . . The editors of Switching Codes illustrate through dialogues that perpetuating a dichotomy between science and the arts is not just false but reductive and beside the point."-- "American Literary History"
"What happens when academics invite artists, scholars and technology specialists to discuss the potential and limitations of digital technologies for research and practice in the humanities and the arts? This is the question addressed by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover's Switching Codes. . . . What is original in Switching Codes is the performance of this dialogue, which blends essays, interviews, fictional pieces and a game. The result is a multimodal discourse that evokes the experience of navigating online data."-- "Visual Studies"

"Switching Codes is a highly interesting and important collection of essays that addresses a current, burgeoning concern with the present condition and future of what we now call Digital Humanities. Most remarkably, this book makes a conscious effort to open questions about the future of scholarship in digitally mediated culture to art that is born digital. This is a book I will refer to frequently."

--John Cayley, Brown University