Computer Philology: Technical Lectures of the BASIC Programming Culture

• Applicant: Dr. Stefan Höltgen
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 498549454

The Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) was considered the ‘lingua franca’ of programming languages for more than two decades. Since its invention in 1964, BASIC did not only open computer programming for new educated classes, but it also triggered the emergence and development of the personal computer era in the mid-1970s. Especially from 1974 (when the first BASIC dialects for microcomputers were published) to 1991 (when the first structured BASIC dialects emerged), the programming language shaped a great variety of international programming cultures that were dedicated to specific homecomputer platforms and their hardware-dedicated BASIC dialects. Studies that examine the correlation and inter-dependency of those different platforms, their BASIC dialects and the cultures (and their programming output) that emerge from both do not exist thus far.The planned project will close this research gap and describe a pluri-methodic analysis of the programming language BASIC, the international programming cultures that base on it, and their semi-professional and hobbyistic usage of BASIC.The primary research objectives are: a description of the interdependency of computer platforms, BASIC dialects, usage and programming techniques; the theoretical development of new sources for computer culture analysis and the further development of the theory and method of computer philology. For this, a sociolinguistic analysis and taxonomy of BASIC dialects and their regional proliferation as well as the pragmatics and stylistics of their usage will be developed using the example of computer game programming.Those games, programmed in BASIC, were published as source codes in books, magazines, newsletters and other analog and digital media. A selection of those codes will be examined because this software genre has been developed very hardware-orientated and is quantitatively the most outstanding BASIC software genre. This genre’s archive (as well as the archive of the text type “program listing”) is nearly unexploited by scientific and scholarly research. This analysis requires a specific method: computer philology.Computer philology – as the proposal describes it – is a pluri-methodic approach to complement the existing research of software dialects. It is also a novel contribution to the media studies of computing and computer programming. With it, the applicant takes recourse to his former research activities in the fields of literature, culture, and media studies as well as computer science.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants