@ -14,6 +14,18 @@ Programming then is not just sharing code, but sharing context. A significant st
It's an approach that helps us to think about software as a cultural object. Something "deeply woven into contemporary life –economically, culturally, creatively, politically– in manners both obvious and nearly invisible." (Software Studies, 2009), and not just as technical tool existing in a vacuum.
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An object that, in turn, can be used to probe its surrounding environment. Who is developing it? Who is paying? For what reason? Who is gonna use it? How is it structured? It is a big and centralized system or a loose collection of small and interchangable tools?
There is a difference in scale of space and time between our biological and social selves, and the internal clock of a computer, or the reach of its network. This often lead us to picture wrong images of the technological complexity we are participating in. That's why in order to debug complexity we probably first need to debug software (Shirky, 2014). Understand how does it work, or why it doesn't work the way we expect, either in its technical, cultural, or environmental outcomes.
To participate in the making of software it's a way to attuning with the troubled times we are living in. A chance to gain understanding and agency on things that often slips away from our awareness because too big and slow, or small and fast. Relying on the unthinkable speed of microprocessors and the phantasmal aura of wi-fi, we can make some sense of the unkown of software (Chun, 2022), and the alien and complex systems they constitute.
This is a process that does not stop with programming, and is both more and less than just an engineering problem. It is more because of its public nature, the fine mesh of exchanges and compromises in the communication between people and machine, and between people and people, and between people and resources, and resources and time, and so on. But is it also less than that in the way that when it works, it works, and code disappears.
In this economy of interactions and interfaces issues emerge.
@ -40,3 +40,9 @@ SAMMET: We didn't think they were needed in the Data Division.
Did the COBOL committee seriously believe that the users could not handle grade
school operators of `+`, `-` , `x`, `/`?
## Annette Vee argues for literacy contingencies in her coding literacy
Importantly, Vee indicates that her aim is not to establish what coding literacy should look like; on the contrary, her premise is precisely that ‘prescriptions for literacy are always contingent’ (10) because literacies are always contingent. The framework of literacy helps her mobilize the extensive knowledge embedded in the study of literacy in order to provide a socially and historically informed perspective on coding as a literacy practice.
@ -33,24 +33,6 @@ And how can situated software inform the process of technical writing?
The critical and theoretical research will be weaved around the actual documentations, in order to create a discourse and annotate the development of this practice. ???
<!--
Who can access it?
Where is the documentation hosted?
2. **Tone and style**
How to make documentation more accessible?
How to create multiple entry points in a complex topic?
How to address different kind of users, and not just a generic one?
How to orientate software in the world?
- Documentation as an interface between different knowledges
3. **Susteinability**
How to face the lack of resources when approaching technical writing?
Strategies to share workloads and collaboration
Strategies to take care of shared piece of software. -->
## 1. Coding Contingencies _(2000)_
Situate software as cultural object and propose documentation as a surface to explore it.
