1. What has the author tried to accomplish, and to what extent does the manuscript achieve this? The author plans to write a critique of new media via a reading of codework. However, his notion and coverage of codework is idiosyncratic. It is, as the author acknowledges, highly indebted to the artist Alan Sondheim and his very personal concept of codework as a cross-disciplinary and cross-media "labor of code, subject to thermodynamics" (Sondheim, "What is Codework"). In other words, both Sondheim and Baldwin do not understand codework as a experimental net writing that hybridizes human and machine languages, but conceive of it much (!) more broadly as a performative interfacing to, and a practical anthropology of, online culture. This concept is harder to explain (and justify) in a scholarly project than in artistic work. The author's proposal and sample chapters are, above all, a general critique of contemporary new media studies, and hardly engage with artistic codework. I am not sure whether the lack of references to seminal art projects and standard theoretical writings in this field is intentional. There is, for example, no mention of jodi.org and the mailing list 7-11 although they instigated contemporary experimental code writing. One of the sample chapters covers hypertext without discussing McKenzie Wark's "From Hypertext to Codework". There is no mention of Geoffrey Cox's, Adrian Ward's and Alex McLean's "The Aesthetics of Generative Code", Rita Raley's "Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework", Florian Cramer's "Words Made Flesh", to list only a few standard texts on the subject. It is not clear to me what the author's critique of new media ultimately wants to achieve. In the proposal, he states that "there is no net", arguing (first) phenomenologically and (ultimately) in idealist terms in favor of a subjective and imaginary reality beyond technology. However, this objection could be made against any concept, and any term that assumes objectivity (i.e. "there are no images", "there is no writing" etc.), using the same argument. This tactical conflation of medium and perception - poetics and aesthetics - however has the effect that his argumentation could be easily dismissed as metaphorical. (Just as Sondheim's writing is highly metaphorical in its terminology.) 2. Is the work original and the scholarship sound? The work certainly is original in its attempt to derive a critical discourse from a poetic perspective on the Internet. This is how I also understand the author's insistence on writing a "book of poetics, not theory" although, strictly speaking, poetics _is_ theory, as literary theory nowadays is understood to be synonymous with poetics. Such idiosyncrasies make the project hard to assess between the poles of "originality" and "sound scholarship". 3. Will the work be a significant contribution to the filed? If so, in what way is it significant? In its currently planned form, the book will contribute (in my opinion) rather to the poetics of electronic literature than to a critique of new media and new media studies. In other words, it is more akin to a work like Glazier's "Digital Poetics" than Manovich's "Post-Media Aesthetics". I therefore would prefer it to focus more on readings of digital art/codework. This by no means implies that it would have to compromise on its critical agenda towards the new media discourse. 4. To what audience is this book addressed? Clearly, new media scholars (and graduate students) and an audience interested in electronic poetry and digital arts. In the proposed form, the book might be quickly dismissed in media theoretical criticism. An arts-oriented readership might conversely be disappointed that it does not cover what one would expect from a book on "codework". 5. What are the best books already published on the subject, and how does this work compare with them? N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines and My Mother Was a Computer, especially in their coverage of Talan Memmott's "From Nexia to Perplexia". The author is very aware of Hayles' books as reference works, hence - I guess - his detailed discussion of her in the Shannon chapter. While Hayles is one of the few scholars who closely read codework, she perceives only a small part of the overall artistic field, namely the more conventionally "literary" works of chiefly American electronic poetry writers. Baldwin's project promises (although, unfortunately, hardly so in the sample chapters) to cover codework more comprehensively, reflecting also its more subcultural practitioners. 6. What is your opinion of the manuscript's level, style, organization, length? This is difficult to assess from merely a proposal and two sample chapters. 7. How could the manuscript be improved? Can you cite specific sections or chapters that need revision? In general: The notion of "code" needs to be critically revised, perhaps with Friedrich Kittler's article in the upcoming MIT "Software Studies" book as a reference. Algorithmic program code, cryptographic code, legal code, conversational and social codes are different phenomena bearing the same name often for coincidental historical reasons. Even if codeworks conflate these meanings of "code", they need to be differentiated in a critical analysis. The section on spam needs a reflection on "spam art" as a popular subgenre of net.art since ca. 1997. The overall critique of new media should also reflect Manovich's concept of "post-media". In my opinion, the section on Shannon needs a critical revision. To criticize Shannon's notion of information for its failure to reflect semantics does not automatically mean to regress to an uncritical notion of "universal and direct experience". The author ultimately contradicts his own polemics against hermeneutics through (a) his own subjectivist critique of new media and (b) on page 13, his final agreement with Gumbrecht as an exponent of contemporary hermeneutics. Finally, Jakobson's definition of the poetic function is not derived from Shannon, but from Saussure and the poetics of Russian symbolism (Potebjna) and futurism (Khlebnikov). - With the proposed adjustments, the book could be valuable as a poetics of digital art and culture that revises common their identifications with new media. 8. Overall reaction: I recommend publication, provided the revisions suggested in this review are satisfactorily made.