_note: I'm using the words toolkit, handbook, map, collection of tools, practices or devices as interchangeable. Read it crossing your eyes, as a kind of not-fixed-superposition that will eventually stabilise during the research_
## How do you
### What do you want to make?
## Why
- ecology of _software documentation_
To situate _software documentation_ as an interface between the code, the user, the developer, and the world, is a way to focus on the economy of different knowledges that is necessary when it comes to making software.
- extensible toolkit
- materiality, the actors involved, economy that surrounds it
- an interface between the code, the user, the developer, the community, and the world
- economy of different knowledges
- make place for different voices.
An extensible toolkit to explore _software documentation_ as an interface between the code, the user, the developer, the community and the world. A set of practices to approach it with different focus:
_"A list doesn't have to impose a single mode of ordering on what is included in it. Items in the list aren't necessarily responses to the same questions but may hang together in other ways... a list differs from a classification in that it recognizes its incopleteness. It doesn't even need to seek completeness. If someone comes along with something to add to the list, something that emerges as important, this may indeed be added to it."_
[John Law and Annemarie Mol, Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices]
---
- A collection of small devices to assist and stimulate the documentation process, with cue and gently reminders that _software documentation_ is a form of care.
- A series of writing prompts to experiment with _software documentation_ as a generative device to keep thinking through code from different and marginal perspectives.
- A way to understand publishing as iterative process, as a format that grows and shrinks through versioning and embrances branching to adapt to specific environments.
- A (loose, habitable, extensible) map to orientate around what does it mean to _make software_ besides just writing code.
- A writing machine to build worlds around software.
### How do you plan to make it?
_note: the plan is to use the different hackpacts and assignments as a way to bootstrap different directions for the research. Every hackpact is self contained and in effect is a different prototype, but it rarelly ends when a new one starts. Rather, with every new hackpact the old ones continue developing in the background with less intensity, but in concert, informing each other._
`[Hackpact 1 - Define a domain of research]`
Where does software documentation begin and where does it end? What about README files, tutorials, guidelines, comments in the source code, and demos? How porous or tentacular is this surface? Set some references by looking back at the works made last year and read them through the axis of code and care. Explore common templates of documentation and their habitability.
`[Hackpact 2 - Write documentation & focus on its contents and style]`
Write documentation for selected prototypes from the many made last year: could this process create a new public, or transform their original ones?
As initial case study focus on the [Padliography](https://hub.xpub.nl/soupboat/padliography/), a tool developed within XPUB to keep track of the amount of scattered Etherpad documents used to take notes and work togheter. During last year it's been used only in the context of our class, but after some adjustments it's now flexible enough to be offered also to other constellations orbiting around the _XPUB & Lens-Based wiki_.
What does it mean to offer it to someone else? How to talk the same language in different contexts? How to be clear without oversimplifying?
`[Hackpact 3 - Write documentation & focus on the process of writing]`
Open the writing process and experiment collaborative practices for the documentation of the [Workbook](https://hub.xpub.nl/soupboat/workbook/), a tool developed together with Supi to keep track and annotate configurations for different instruments and facilitate learning process.
Write the documentation together. Could there be multiple voices or is necessary to keep a single point of view? What does it mean to write with different intensities? Can we imagine ways to zoom in and out details level? How different knowledges can participate in the process?
`[Hackpact 4 - Write documentation & focus on the surrounding context]`
Expand the research to tap into ongoing projects outside XPUB, such as freelance work and parallel research like [Object Oriented Choreography](../ooc-summer-session/), a performative project of mine related to networked technologies, VR and contemporary dance.
Are there ways to make the documentation process more sustainable (socially, economically)? Are there strategies to overcome low-resources environments? Search for escamotages to create space and energies to document. Use documentation to work with collaborators, clients, and end-users and approach code from multiple point of view.
Try to infiltrate the industry of software development through documentation. Attempt to expose their public to these issues in subtle ways. Offer entry points and escape routes from the automatic outcomes proposed by tech solutionism. Offer alternatives to sedimented roles in the care of software.
`[hackpact 5 - Write documentation & focus on who is writing it]`
What are the relations between documentation and the community around a software?
- Experiment with versioning.
- Try to have several instances of the same documentation.
- Try to question who gets to write and who gets to read the documentation.
- Shift the moment in which the documentation happens.
- Where the documentation is hosted?
Question the nature of the documentation: what does it take for granted? For what kind of public it is produced, and what kind of public does it produce? How does it normalize the context around the software? What are its politics of access? How does it create entry points and how does it gatekeep?
`[hackpact 6 7 8 - Towards final project]`
- Collect and organize the outcomes from the different hackpacts.
- Trace trends and synthetize common and diverting aspects.
- Research for a surface that could host this different facets.
- How can it inhabit the usual places where documentation is hosted?
### What is your timetable?
**October**
- Define a domain of research.
- Understand where to ground the project by revisiting first year prototypes.
- Think about a glossary and possible formats to test some concept in a small scale, such as the first public moment at Leeszal.
- Experiment writing the documentation for the [Padliography](https://hub.xpub.nl/soupboat/padliography/) and the [Workbook](https://hub.xpub.nl/soupboat/workbook/).
**November**
- Experiment writing documentation for project outside XPUB, both artistic and commercial ones.
- Explore the moments in which the documentation happens.
**December**
- What does scientific literature have to say about software documentation?
- Archeology of software documentation. From printed manuals to README files to CD/CI websites.
**January**
- Field research of the current trends in software documentation. Explore different contexts (solo, coop, corporate, floss, proprietary) and different coding languages.
- Follow up on the outcomes of the different hackpacts. Focus on
1. materiality of the documentation (style, contents, forms),
2. context around the documentation (actors, timeframe, hosting)
**February**
- Research and prototype possible formats for graduation project outcome. What surface could host this different factes together?
- 15 min daily prototypes starting from the sentence `A _________ to explore software documentation as a _________`
**March**
- Follow up on February daily prototypes and plan for production.
**April**
Production! In the form of fast and iterative prototyping.
Think about graduation exhibition and collective pubblication.
**May**
Production! In the form of fine tuning and polishing.
Think about graduation exhibition and collective pubblication.
**June**
Graduation exhibition.
Party
**July**
Siesta
### Why do you want to make it?
Software comes from a really specific occidental cultural tradition.
Software tends to priviledge masculine, binary, exploitative and extractive practices.
Software is shrouded in technical obscurity.
Software comes invisible, transparent, neutral.
Software models the world in order to control it.
To make software means not only to write code, but also to take a stance regarding this trends.
To make software means not only to write code, but also to create a context and community around it.
Documentation is a space that interfaces the different actors around software. Software documentation is a space with potential to renegotiate and reclaim given margins and entry points. It is a chance to overwrite what is normalized, and let different knowledges and voices participate in the discourse around software.
Documenting software is a complex practice. Documenting software is a process of translation. Writing documentation it's more difficult than writing software itself. It requires a lot of time and energy, and it involves many different skills: writing, coding, knowing how to share and at which intensity. It's a collaborative practice that could open to different voices.
As a piece of code would write: I am documented, therefore I am.
### Who can help you and how?
It would be interesting to get in touch with someone mantaining the documentation of open source projects.
Some interesting things could emerge from field research directly in git repositories, issues and wikis.
### Relation to previous practice
> The ordinary professional programmer addresses himself to the problem to be solved, whereas the compulsive programmer sees the problem mainly as an opportunity to interact with the computer. (Joseph Weizenbaum)
I'm into the development of site-specific software. Codes that inhabit and interact with a community. Coding as a form of care. Programming as a way to facilitate agency-on and comprehension-of complex systems. I'm trying to learn how to approach complexity as an environment. How a work can be complex without forcing the result being complicated. This usually happens when diverse actors participate in a process, when ideas and practices traverse through the software without being totally framed into it.
After the work in the past special issues, I'm trying to shift from developing compulsivly to developing in a meaningful way. Meaningful especially in relation to the environment and the other people involved in the process. This means to learn how to balance between different priorities, to understand when to develop something from scratch and when to participate into already existing discourses. It means to learn how to balance between accessibility, susteinability and flexibility.
### Relation to a larger context
- Something in between the refreshing shuffle of perspective in the Oblique Strategies, and the ability to infiltrate established practices like the Lottery of Babel.
- Something to be organized and shared as the Software Design Pattern, but to be discovered and performed as the Minecraft crafting system.
> Code is always addressed to someone. [...] We do not write code for our computers, but rather we write it for humans to read and use. [Jesse Li (2020)](https://blog.jse.li/posts/software/)
Coding is not just production of software, but also production of knowledge. A dialogue between human and more-than-human actors. The guestlist of this conference of the bits is often compiled by chance: the choice of a particular programming language, the coding style, the development environment and ecosystem, the infrastructure that runs the code, and so on, are the result of specific contingencies.
These contingencies are situated in precise contexts, and these contexts are different one from another. Programming is not just sharing code, but sharing context. Programming means to provide a point of view and a perspective to look at the world, before attempting to get some grip onto it with a script. That's the reason why even if source code, even when obfuscated, speaks for itself, it cannot always cast light around its surroundings.
> If software illuminates an unknown, it does so through an unknowable (software) ([Wendy Hui Kyong Chun](http://computationalculture.net/software-studies-revisited/), 2022)
To make place for code turns to be a necessary act of care in the process of sharing knowledge. This does not mean to constrain the usage of some piece of software, or provide opinionated solutions or tutorials, but rather letting others know where does this code come from, and where it would like to go.
> “Our machines should be non-binary, decentralized and unknowing.” (James Bridle. “Ways of Being.”)
> “To think again or anew, we need to re-enchant our tools.” (James Bridle. “New Dark Age.”)
Documentation is a way to produce narrations around software. To create a world for a software to inhabit, to give it affordances and stretch what is possible to do or to think with it. Documentation is a space for the political of software. It's a surface that could host ideas in close contact with codes, letting them entangle and shape each other.
### References/bibliography
Start from here
- Fuller, M ed. (2008) Software Studies: A Lexicon, MIT Press
- Ullman, E (2013) Close to the machine: Technophilia and its Discontents, Pushkin Press
- Bridle, J (2022) Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Bridle, J (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso
- Bratton, B H (2016) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press
And then a list of possible references
- Hayles, N K (2005) My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, University of Chicago Press
- Sterling, B (2005) Shaping Things, MIT Press
- Mackenzie, A (2006) Cutting Code; Software and Sociality, International Academic Publisher
- Suchman, L A (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Cambridge University Press
- Law, J ed. and Mol, A ed. (2002) Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Duke University Press Books
Balibar, É (2020) On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community, Fordham University Press
- Cantwell Smith, B (1996) On the Origin of Objects, Bradfor Book
- Knuth, D E (1973) The Art of Computer Programming, Addison-Wesley
- Knuth, D E (1992) Literate Programming, Center for the Study of Language and Information
- Brodie, L (1984) Thinking Forth, Punchy Publising
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge" (2005) Grey Room. 18
- Lethbridge, Chantelle & Sim, Susan & Singer, Janice. (1999). Software Anthropology: Performing Field Studies in Software Companies.
- Crowston, Kevin and Howison, James, "The Social Structure of Open Source Software Development Teams" (2003). School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship. 123.
- Shirky, C (2004) [Situated Software](https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html)
