An incredible review of our new book, Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, by the incomparable Alan Liu (UCSB):
To my knowledge, it is the only work to date in the new media studies/digital humanities area that provides a full methodological paradigm (and case example) for how to "read" contemporary creative works of digital media through interwoven analysis of all the levels of digital phenomena from code (source and compiled) through interface to traditionally interpretable textual/visual "meaning" or "narrative." *Reading Project* pursues each of these types of analysis with a degree of rigor and invention that makes it state-of-the-art in the field. For instance, the analysis through visual modeling techniques (for which Jeremy is principally responsible) marks the leading edge of digital visualization methods.... Similarly, the code analysis of the decompiled Flash code animating William Poundstone's *Project for Tachistocope* (the specific work of electronic literature that Reading Project takes as its case study) is state of the art because its principal contributor, Mark Marino, was one of the original innovators in the field of "critical code studies." And in the same vein, the "traditional" analysis of textual and visual meaning in Poundstone's avant-garde work led principally by Jessica Pressman rivals the very best of so-called "close reading" in modern literary interpretation, but in a new key informed by the hermeneutics of visualization data-mining and code analysis. There simply is no other extant work that combines these reading methods in one organic paradigm, let alone demonstrates them with detail, rigor, and brilliance in the reading of a specific digital work. In general, I note, much recent debate among literary scholars (and other humanists) confronted with digital new media and the digital humanities has bruited the supposed contrast between an older mode of "close reading" and the new digitally-enabled "distant reading" (data-mining and text-analysis modeling of datasets rather than individual works). Through explicit methodological argument and also by example, *Reading Project* persuasively shows that the binary terms of the debate are false. As the authors argue, their variety of analytical reading methods adapted to new media allows them to "zoom in" and "zoom out" so as to inextricably bind close reading to distant reading. *Reading Project* is an original, substantial, and important contribution to the study of creative digital works in the humanities. The book makes a compelling case for how all digital work--creative or not, in the humanities or not--must henceforth be studied."