Study maps 1.6M creative coding repos on Software Heritage

A team of researchers—Benoit Baudry, Yogya Gamage, Nadia Gonzalez Fernandez, Lena MK, Roxana Pena Mendieta, Rafaela Souza Pinter, and Stefano Zacchiroli—released a new paper titled "Art in Humanity's Code" on arXiv (2608.05174). The study represents the first large-scale empirical analysis of public repositories that rely on artist-led open-source libraries like Processing and openFrameworks. Digging into Software Heritage's vast archive, they examined 1,613,571 code repositories, combining quantitative metrics with qualitative case studies to understand who practices creative coding, where they are located, and how these works are used. The data reveals a striking global footprint for generative art and creative coding, with adoption spanning both formal education and professional creative industries. Concrete examples showcase contributor profiles from around the world, illustrating everything from classroom assignments to gallery-ready contemporary art installations.

The findings are significant for several reasons. First, they offer empirical evidence that creative coding has become a genuinely worldwide movement, not a niche Western phenomenon. Second, they highlight the dual role of these libraries: they are both teaching tools for computer science and art curricula and production frameworks for commercial studios and independent artists. The researchers also emphasize that this dataset can help educators, researchers, and artists better understand diversity in the digital world—who gets to create with code, and how those creations circulate. By documenting a wide range of practices, the paper lays groundwork for fostering sustained diversity in software-mediated creativity. The authors make the paper available with HTML and PDF access, and they've linked related tools like Connected Papers and scite.ai for further exploration.