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Fall 2021 Panel:
Hosted by the Social Media Narratives Class
With Rob Wittig, he is a co-founder of Meanwhile… Netprov Studios. His recent work includes Salt Immortal Sea and Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House, a collection of interactive stories he writes with his children. He was one of ten co-authors of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2013) and joined with Jessica Pressman and Jeremy Douglass on Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa Press, 2015). His latest book, Critical Code Studies was just published by MIT Press. Mark is also the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization. He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab, a colaboratory exploring the explication of computer source code. (Full portfolio here) When Code Gets Social There was a time when programming, like writing, seemed a solitary affair, as early programmers worked largely by themselves to encode instructions. However, from the days of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through Chris Strachey and Alan Turing through the women who coded for the ENIAC to today, programming has been a source of connections, albeit hierarchic connections. In our contemporary moment, thanks to a proliferation of platforms, programming or code is more social than ever. Code repositories, such as Github and Gitlab offer places to share code to be refined and forked as it becomes something other than it was when first uttered. Venues, such as OpenProcessing.org, boast over 100,000 members who make new forms of creative coding. Through platforms such as Jupyter Notebooks and Google Colab, collaborators can embed working code in larger discussions, akin to embedding an image or video, facilitating conversations through and around functioning code. Live coding and collaborative coding IDEs, such as VS Code and Atom offer powerful desktop applications, running thousands of subprograms to facilitate group authoring beyond asynchronous versioning, which is itself a key component for software development. That's not to forget the many discussion forums, including Stack Overflow, where more bugs are squashed, more work-arounds shared than perhaps on any other site. Such sites foster communities formed around mutual aid. In the era of distributed work environments, productivity chat channels, like Slack, Ryver, and Mattermost offer opportunities for teams to integrate office platforms, like Trello and Google Drive, with hashtags, scripts, and droids, like DocBot to check for grammar and syntax and even tools that can retrieve code from Github. Conversation is key to code and critical to understanding how and what code means. I have been trying to facilitate conversations around code through my creative and critical works. My driving question: How can we use code more intentionally as a site of communication? How can we understand the messages others are communicating through and with code? How can we read code together and write code conscious of a wider audience? I foster some of this work under the banner of critical code studies through communities like the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. During the biennial Critical Code Studies Working Groups (CCSWGs) (see the current cfp), we invite participants to join discusses about code via a Vanilla forum (see this sample thread co-led by Judy Malloy), though we have experimented with various platforms from Scalar to Google Docs. Critical code studies holds that computer source code conveys meaning that grows out of and extends beyond its functional meaning. In the first CCSWG, Dennis Jerz led us in a collective cave dive through the caverns of ADVENTURE in our preliminary search for ways to characterize the meaning of code. We had to get heuristic lamps to discover how code speaks, as Cox and McClean have put it. By this formulation, code is not merely something that does, it is a site of communication. By sharing, reading, and writing code, people make and express meaning. I have attempted to illustrate this principle in my short interactive work Flight of the Code Monkeys, a tale built on Google Colab, which invites readers to alter the source code of the story in order to determine the character’s path through the story. In another example of communication through code, Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox published their book, Aesthetic Programming on Gitlab, inviting others to fork it, an invitation Sarah Ciston and I took up, adding our own chapter, which followed their pattern of code examples embedded in discussions of cultural contexts. Discourse has become forkable as code teaches language a lesson in conversation. A recently formed Discord-based community Knit&Perl, which I started up with Anne Sullivan and Anastasia Salter, offers a communal conversation place for weaving together coding and stitching practices in the warp and weft of discussion threads that mix sewing patterns and JavaScript and Python. On all of these platforms, code is an occasion for communal interactions and conversation, but code is not merely the object that gathers people together, but instead, as in custom car culture and baking contests, in garden parties and rap battles, the code is also the means of the conversation and, increasingly, a medium available for real-time modification and extension, vision and revision, more analogous to the social interactions of conversation, collective game playing, and even dance. |
Panelists
Meredith D. Clark
Shaohua Guo
Mark C. Marino
Jeff Nunokawa
Élika Ortega
Abraham Richie
Katrin Tiidenberg
SAIC ATS Class in Social Media Narrative Host: SAIC ATS Part-time Faculty: Judy Malloy |
Mark C. Marino is a writer and scholar of electronic literature living in Los Angeles. His works include