Worlding and Software

How do you chose a particular programming language, a coding style, a development environment and ecosystem, an infrastructure where to run the code, and so on?

These are not just technical choices, but rather coding contingencies.

These contingencies are situated in precise economical, cultural, creative, political, and technical contexts. Programming then is not just sharing code, but sharing context. It's providing a perspective to look at the world before attempting to get some grip onto it with a script.

How to offer a point of view through the lens of software?
Who get to participate in this process of making meaning?
How to create a discourse for the code to inhabit?
How to stretch the affordances of code, besides, technicality, marketing, and advertisement?

Enter documentation

Could software documentation:

1. be an ideal surface to build worlds?
2. be an interface between different knowledges?
3. be a device to trigger different kind of economy around situated software?

How can situated practices inform the process of documenting software? And how can situated software inform the process of technical writing?

Contents

The thesis is composed of different texts: some provide context and critical background to situate the research, while others consist in experiments of actual documentation written for software developed within our course.

Every piece of documentation will try to reflect on different angles.

More precisely these four aspects will be addressed:

• Tone and style
  How to make a 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?

• Participation
  Who gets to write, and who is forced to do it? How does development and technical writing interact? Is technical writing a subaltern position in the industry of software development?

• Destination
  Who can read documentation? Who can access? Where is the documentation hosted? How does it relate with a bigger context, if any?

• 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.

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.

Table of contents (draft)

0. Coding Contingencies Situate software as cultural object and proposes documentation as a surface to explore it. Written as a simulation.