A brief guide to each tool. Follow the Deep dive link on any tool for its extended page with operations, theoretical background, and status. The close-reading method opens a single artefact for intensive interpretation; comparative analysis sets witnesses side by side.
Close reading
The Critical Code Studies Workbench is a web application for the close reading and hermeneutic analysis of software as a cultural artefact. It works in three modes. **Critique** is an IDE-style close reading of existing code, with inline annotations across six types (observation, question, metaphor, pattern, context, critique) and an AI co-reader at the level of an expert peer. **Interpret** teaches the CCS methodology and the hermeneutic frameworks themselves, scaffolding the reader who is new to the approach. **Create** is generative coding to understand algorithms by building them. Annotation infrastructure is shared with the wider family.
Stack: Next.js, React, TypeScript, with multi-provider AI adapters.
Comparative analysis
Source Variorum is a side-by-side textual collation workbench. A *variorum*, from *cum notis variorum*, "with the notes of various people", collates all known variants of a text so that a reader can track how textual decisions were made. Source Variorum brings that apparatus to computational close reading across two modes, **source code** (line- and token-aware, monospace) and **prose** (sentence- and word-aware, with witness sigla). It renders two witnesses in parallel with a central *braid*: curved ribbons connecting matched passages, including passages that have moved. The crossing of those ribbons is the analytical payload, showing at a glance where text has been added, deleted, substituted, or transposed, with an auto-generated critical apparatus listing every locus of divergence by siglum.
Stack: Next.js, TypeScript; auto-collation with hand-correction.
A note on naming
The naming grammar borrows from the vocabulary of textual scholarship:
- Workbench: a surface for close, iterative work with a single artefact, in the manner of critical code studies.
- Variorum: an edition that collates the variants of a text and records, in an apparatus, the notes of its various readers.
- Witness, siglum, apparatus: the terms of art the tools make operable on computational material.
