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.

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, 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)

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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.

• feed
• content aggregation
• multiple reading paths