The term is Lev Manovich's, but he hasn't done much to define it, at least not yet. What is software studies then? Or what is software studies to me? Software studies is what media theory becomes after the bubble bursts. Software studies is whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and penny-stocks. Software studies is PowerPoint vaporware and proofs of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain name is eighteen months expired. Software studies is, or can be, the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical discipline to parse those histories against the material matrix of the present. Software studies is understanding that digital objects are sometimes lost, yes, but mostly, and more often, just forgotten. Software studies is about adding more memory.
In other words, digital objects have histories--but it seems to me we're only just beginning to learn what it means to appreciate that. Which is why I was so happy to find How They Got Game: The History of Videogames and Interactive Simulations. Incidentally, this is also precisely the kind of work the Electronic Literature Organization's PAD project is undertaking--to the inexplicable consternation of some. More on that, perhaps, later . . .
Update 5/27/03: See also the Software History Center. And Henry Lowood, one of the people behind How They Got Game, has a couple of very worthwhile talks on "the hard work of software history" linked from his vita.
A software studies reading cluster: Lowood's essays, Martin Campbell Kelly's just-published From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog (MIT 2003), Ullman's The Bug, and Freidrich Kittler's classic essay "There is No Software."