Article:
Reciprocal Materiality and the Body of Code. A Close Reading of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

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dc.creatorHeilmann, Till A.
dc.date.accessioned2018-09-25T15:09:51Z
dc.date.available2018-09-25T15:09:51Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.description.abstractMateriality has often been a neglected factor in discussions of digitally encoded information. While a lot of early works in media studies suffered from this shortcoming, questions regarding the materiality of digital technology and artefacts have slowly gained prominence in recent debates. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s concept of “forensic” and “formal” materiality has proven particularly useful to the study of digital artefacts, differentiating the (routinely over-looked) physical existence of digital data from their (commonly discussed) logical character. However, analyses concerning the materiality of digital artefacts are often one-sided, focussing on the physicality of the medium in which digital data are inscribed. To counter this bias, I present the concept of a ‘reciprocal materiality’ of digital data: It is not only that digital data are always inscribed in some material substrate (Kirschenbaum’s ‘forensic’ dimension of data); conversely, the materiality of the medium inscribes itself into the structure of digital data (its ‘formal’ level). The ‘body of code’ is shaped by the material framework it inhabits. I will illustrate this using as an example one of the most important encoding schemes in the history of digital technology: the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). A ‘close reading’ of the technical specifications of ASCII – a standard designed in the early 1960s to work across multiple technological platforms – will reveal the extent to which this code incorporates the materiality of media such as punched tape and teletype terminals.en
dc.identifier.doi10.25969/mediarep/678
dc.identifier.urihttp://digicults.org/files/2016/11/I.2-Heilmann_2015_The-body-of-code.pdf
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/3141
dc.languageeng
dc.publishertranscript
dc.publisher.placeBielefeld
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2364-2114
dc.relation.ispartofseriesDigital Culture & Society
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 Generic
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
dc.subjectreziproke Materialitätde
dc.subjectASCIIde
dc.subjectreciprocal materialityen
dc.subjectasciien
dc.subject.ddcddc:004
dc.subject.personMatthew G. Kirschenbaum
dc.titleReciprocal Materiality and the Body of Code. A Close Reading of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)de
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dcterms.bibliographicCitationHeilmann, Till A. (2015): "Reciprocal Materiality and the Body of Code. A Close Reading of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)". In: Digital Culture & Society 1 (1), S. 39–52. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/678.
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2021-05-29T02:29:58
local.identifier.firstpublishedhttp://digicults.org/files/2016/11/I.2-Heilmann_2015_The-body-of-code.pdf
local.source.epage52
local.source.issue1
local.source.spage39
local.source.volume1
local.subject.gndhttps://d-nb.info/gnd/132553554
local.subject.wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8815

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1(1) 2015: Digital Materialism