There are already many things that the field of API development and poetry share. Poetry seeks to make new meaning through novel configurations of elements (words) from an already established system (language). API development, being related to the organization and presentation of information, can also be seen as making meaning through novel configuration of various elements, which are not just limited to language and text, but also might include images, symbolic meaning, and visual culture writ large. Poetry, more so than other literatures, is concerned not only with the denotative meaning of words, but also the meaning that arises from the aesthetic quality of words (things like phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, rhyme, metre). In dealing with typography, developers are also interested in both the denotative meaning and aesthetic qualities of a text they are working with. Both have a playful relationship to structure, sometimes adhering to, and sometimes breaking, form.
There are already many things that the field of API development and poetry share. Poetry seeks to make new meaning through novel configurations of elements (words) from an already established system (language). API development, being related to the organization and presentation of information, can also be seen as making meaning through novel configuration of various elements, which are not just limited to language and text, but also might include images, symbolic meaning, and visual culture writ large. Poetry, more so than other literatures, is concerned not only with the denotative meaning of words, but also the meaning that arises from the aesthetic quality of words (things like phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, rhyme, metre). In dealing with code, developers are also interested in both the denotative meaning and aesthetic qualities of a text they are working with. Both have a playful relationship to structure, sometimes adhering to, and sometimes breaking, form.
However, one thing that API development does not often do, that poetry does, is making a world, to provide a rich context for their work that reaches towards the poetic, the fantastical, the improbable, the mythological. This is extremely worthwhile for developers to pursue, because worldbuilding allows for the potential for narratives to sprawl out nonlinearly. It invites a non-teleological reading (reading without a prescribed goal) of the text, (or image, or whatever the object of API development is) and offers a point of resistance against API development’s primary function as lubricant for the smooth flow of capital (be it economic, or otherwise), which relies on a singular, totalizing interpretation of the world.
@ -147,7 +147,7 @@ Once you identify these you can begin a chapter outline. -->
## Coding Contingencies.
I want to write about world-building and software.
I want to write about worlding around software.
How do you chose a particular programming language, the coding style, the development environment and ecosystem, the infrastructure which runs the code, and so on? These are not just technical choices, but rather coding contingencies.
@ -155,6 +155,53 @@ These contingencies are situated in precise contexts. Programming then is not ju
More specifically, I would like to focus on software documentation as a surface for world-building.
The plan:
0. Coding Contingencies
1. Context of software studies
2. There is no such thing as undocumented software, in the sense that if it's undocumented we cannot see it.
3. Documentation as an interface between different actors.
1. Documentation x Worlding
1. Excerpts from [API Worlding](../api-worldbuilding/), versioned essay from Tiger Dingsun.
2. When there is documentation
1. Who writes? Who reads?
2. Language, modes of address.
3. Neoliberal documentation
3. And when there is not
1. A way to reactivate/reclaim code?
2. Ways of writing, economies of knowledges
3. Practice proposals
4. Worlding through documentations mixtape
1. Excerpts from documentations that world
2. Individuate approaches and angles
2. Different case studies read through strategies of 1.4.2
1. Cases study
1. Soupboat
2. 100R
3. Permacomputing
2. A list of devices to articulate software documentation as a form of care (project overview)
---
Mode of address?
## Topological writing
> To make sense of multiplicity, we need to think and write in topological ways, discovering methods for laying out a space, for laying out spaces, and for defining paths to walk through these. _[John Law and Annemarie Mol, Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices]_
A suitable form could be that of the feed that is: a structure to aggregate contents.
