kamo-soupbato/projects/gpp/documentation.md

categories	cover	cover_alt	date	description	slug	title
GRS Writing Research	gppc.jpg	someone wants to graduate eh	08/10/2022	The secret plan to graduate	gpp	Graduation Project Proposal

Draft Project Proposal

What do you want to make?

Focus on software documentation as an interface between code, users, developers, communities, and the world.

Research how writing software documentation changes depending on the context and actors involved.

Experiment with software documentation as a generative device to keep thinking through code from different perspectives.

Explore software documentation as iterative process, as a format that grows and shrinks through versioning and embrances branching to adapt to specific environments.

Develop tools to facilitate rich software documentation. To assist and stimulate the writing process with prompts and gently reminders that software documentation is a form of care.

How do you plan to make it?

Define a domain of research. Where does software documentation begin and where does it end? What about tutorials, guidelines, 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.

Start writing 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, 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.

Open the writing process to include collaborative practices for the documentation of the Workbook. This is a joint project started with Supi to build an online-modular-workbook-cms to learn how analog synths work through interactive annotation.

Write the documentation together. Could there be multiple voices or is necessary to keep a single point of view? Experiment with versioning. Try to have several instances of the same documentation.

Expand the research to tap into ongoing projects outside XPUB, such as freelance works and parallel research such as OOC.

Are there ways to make the documentation process more sustainable (socially, economically)? Are there strategies to overcome a low-resources environment? Search for escamotages to create space and energies to document. Work with collaborators, clients, and end-users to approach code from multiple point of view.

What are the relations between documentation and the community around a software?

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?

Try to infiltrate the industry of software development through documentation. Attempt to expose their public to these questions in subtle ways. Offer entry points and escape routes from the universal solution proposed by big corporates.

What is your timetable?

October

Define a domain of research. Do not decide on it's granularity.

Define the premises where which to ground the project by revisiting first year projects.

Think about a glossary and possible formats to test some concept in a small scale, such as the first public moment at Leeszal or the freelance works.

Experiment writing the documentation for the Padliography and the Workbook.

November

Work on OOC for December performance at NaO Festival, Milan. What does it mean to document a bespoke tool developed just for this project? Experiment with the documentation for the interactive patch of OOC.

Get in touch with key figures to interview for research.

December

OOC performance in Milan. Follow-up about the different documentation processes. Gather material to have an historical overview of software documentation.

January

Gather material to have a critical overview around software documentation. Field research of the current state of software documentation. Explore different fields: big projects, small projects, corporate documentation and solo developers. Explore different languages and reflect on how they features are reflected in the documentation. Experiment continuing writing the documentation for different prototypes. How does this process of writing documentation inform the process of writing the thesis? Experiment with the idea of versioning, branching, collaborative writing.

February

Read read read and write write write. Interview and case studies from different communities? Experiment with the idea of versioning, branching, collaborative writing.

March

Self-induce dreams about the final outcome with a follow-up on the thesis research. Research and prototype possible formats for graduation project outcome.

April

Production! Think about graduation exhibition and collective pubblication.

May

Production! 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 open source projects such as Paged.js, P5Js, vvvv. 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

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)

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, 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

• Catgirl (2022) Comfy Software

• Li, J (2020) Where Did Software Go Wrong?

• wiki.c2.com