kamo-soupbato/projects/thesis-outline/thesis-outline.md

categories	date	description	slug	title
GRS Writing Research	03/11/2022	Outline for the thesis	thesis-outline	Thesis Outline

Coding Contingencies.

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.

These contingencies are situated in precise contexts. Programming then is not just sharing code, but sharing context. It's 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.

More specifically, I would like to focus on software documentation as a surface for world-building.

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]

Since last year I'm prototyping writing machines in order to keep track of what happens around XPUB. Some examples are this very section of the Soupboat that is a way to document projects, the Padliography that is a way to archive documents and links, the xquisite branch made during SI17 that is a branching take on the exquisite corpse game, etc. Probably to develop software is my strategy to get grip on the world. Every writing machine implies a different way to think about your contents. The plan is to develop something as well for this research process.

The topological way to think and write the thesis is to be find somewhere around:

• the list form used by LW in the Tractatus,
• the branching and merging pathways of version control systems, and
• the content aggregation approach of bookmarking tools such as are.na

At the moment I can see it as a feed with a tagging system. The plan is to gather contents and curate them in a non-linear fashion, so instead of following the index as a series of step, imagine to read it as a coral-like creature, with materials forking and interfering with each other.

These contents will be a mix of diverse registry, from the essayistic to the technical to the anedoctic, in order to have several layers of accessibility. The consistency of the discourse will vary: some parts will be more narrative and some other more scattered.

1. Coding Contingencies

   1. Context of software studies
   2. Documentation as an interface between the code, the user, the developer, and the world.

2. Documentation as worlding

   1. Excerpts from API Worlding, versioned essay from T. Dingsun.

   2. When there is documentation

      1. Language, modes of address.
      2. Who writes? Who reads?
      3. Unthinking neoliberal documentation

   3. And when there is not

      1. A space to reactivate/reclaim/reorientate 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

3. Software as care

   1. Cases study articulated through the points emerged from 2.4.2

      1. Soupboat
      2. 100R
      3. Permacomputing

   2. A list of devices to articulate software documentation as a form of care (project overview)