Editors’ Summary: In “Conversations about conversational code,” Mark C. Marino and colleagues revisit Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA through the recovered original source code, showing how close, collaborative code reading can reshape software history. Based on four years of interdisciplinary work, the article uncovers discrepancies between Weizenbaum’s published accounts and the actual MAD-SLIP implementation, including undocumented features, edited canonical conversations, gendered histories around ELIZA’s unnamed users, and the program’s surprising theoretical depth. By treating ELIZA’s code as both a technical artifact and a cultural text, the authors offer a model for critical code studies that speaks directly to today’s debates about chatbots, conversational AI, and the ethics of human–machine interaction.
Editors’ Choice: Conversations about conversational code: on the collaborative critical code studies reading of ELIZA
