Conversations about conversational code: on the collaborative critical code studies reading of ELIZA

Abstract

Published in 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA is the first conversational agent or chatbot, most famous for its DOCTOR persona. In 2021, a group of scholars recovered the original source code for ELIZA from the MIT archives. For about four years, an expanded team of eight scholars from diverse disciplines explored this code through weekly meetings in one of the longest ongoing projects of critical code studies. This paper presents both the methodology of conversational close reading as well as the substantive findings that resulted from the sustained collaborative inquiry. Their investigation examined not only how ELIZA functions technically but also what it reveals about the cultural moment of its development and its enduring influence. The team interrogated the code by reading it line-by-line, porting it to other languages, and attempting to run it on emulators, while also consulting archival materials and conducting interviews with Weizenbaum’s contemporaries. This collaborative approach revealed significant discrepancies between Weizenbaum’s published descriptions of ELIZA and its actual implementation, including previously undocumented features and editing of canonical conversations. The project demonstrates how critical code studies can operate as a conversational method, where a team of scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds can use a technical analysis to open up a broader cultural and philosophical discussion. By treating source code as a cultural text rich with historical significance, this work bridges software history with code analysis and offers insights into the development of human–computer conversation that have become more increasingly relevant in today’s era of large language models. This paper selectively documents the team’s process, discoveries, and reflections, offering their collaborative model as a template for understanding both historical and contemporary computational artifacts for future projects in critical code studies.