*CFP: Source Code Criticism: The Hermeneutics, Philology, and Didactics of Algorithms* Algorithms determine our situation. From bubble sort to Google’s Page Rank, credit scores, and predictive policing, the logic of algorithms intervenes at every step in our lives. Some operate opaquely, shielding their inner workings from curious eyes. Others strive to be transparent, are shared on repositories like GitHub, and follow an ethics of open source accountability. In both cases, however, a more than trivial effort is required to understand the source codes in which algorithms are usually written. The workshop “Source Code Criticism: Hermeneutics, Philology, and Didactics of Algorithms” examines the various ways in which code can be read, interpreted, and made accessible to current and future readers, and investigates its role both as often impenetrable societal force as well as a very particular type of text. In the widest sense, any chain of operation including human and non-human elements requiring symbolic operations is an algorithm. In a narrower sense, however, when we speak of algorithms, we usually mean the texts of higher-level programming languages like Python, Java, or C++. As text, source code is anything but ordinary. It acts as an agent in complex chains of operations and its effects are not confined to the computer alone but impact social, legal, and economic relations in the real world. Algorithms are thus social constructs functioning at the interfaces between humans and machines, implemented in concrete platforms and written by actual humans. A hermeneutics of algorithms has to take this social reality of source codes into account in addressing such questions as: What is the ontological status of algorithms? What is their social, legal, and economic agency? And in what constellations is their apparent objectivity at odds with their cultural embeddedness? Codes are peculiar texts in other ways as well. They perform actions when executed, reducing expressive language to pure imperatives applied to otherwise inert data structures. They are thus at the same time more than and less than ordinary language, requiring a philology that is equally at home in computer science as in textual criticism. However, source code is by its very nature already deeply philological: If philologists contextualise and enrich the source text through commentary, programmers habitually integrate such commentary into their source code. As non-executable lines that are skipped by the compiler, comments are used to elucidate the workings of the code to their current or future readers. Computer scientist Donald Knuth first formulated the idea of software development as a kind of philological critique and proposed that source code should be as intensely documented as possible, thus rendering algorithms self-explanatory, transparent, and comprehensible not only for their authors but also for later readers and editors. The workshop wants to ask what it would mean to take Knuth’s challenge seriously as a philological practice. What could such a “source code criticism” look like? And can we imagine it as a retrospective task for researchers to actively intervene in the source code and add extensive commentary to it? Finally, unlike ordinary text, the performative element of source code also invites us to intervene in it and explore its scope, possibilities, and affordances. Textual criticism and hermeneutics thus become practical and interactive. Such interaction addresses one of the main tasks of the current humanities – to develop a familiarity with coding as such that bridges the gap between the computer sciences and the interpretative disciplines. Code literacy is sorely needed in the humanities. At the very least, as a passive skill: You don’t have to be a literary critic in order to read a novel. Nor do you need to be a computer scientist in order to understand and critically read software code. Yet digital literacy is a critical faculty necessary to understand, disclose, classify, contextualise, and explain code in order to counter the much-invoked power of algorithms. In order to recognise how exactly a user is used by software, it is necessary to decipher, comprehend and critically uncover the design and construction of an algorithm. The workshop addresses scholars within and outside fields such as Critical Code Studies, Software and Platform Studies and media studies, and it invites contributors to comment on the hermeneutics, philology, and didactics of code. The papers should not exceed 30 minutes and should be delivered in English. Please send an *abstract* *of no more than 300 words* and a *brief biographical note* to hannes.bajohr@unibas.ch by *October 31st*. The workshop will be held on *March 25, 2022* as a hybrid conference in person in Basel, Switzerland, as well as over Zoom.