From Codework to Working Code: A Programmer's Approach to Digital Literacy

What does it mean to be digitally literate?
Obviously it entails a basic familiarity with
commonly used technologies, so that one
may navigate the technological life world that
has permeated nearly every aspect of the
human one. One aspect of this knowledge
is the recognition of computer languages,
communications protocols, syntactic forms,
passages of program code, and command
line arguments, even when they have been
taken out of their operational context for
use as literary and rhetorical devices. In
addition to the infiltration of the abbreviated
language of email and text messaging into
mainstream print media, it is now also
commonplace to encounter programming
keywords, symbols, operators, indentation,
and pagination entwined with natural,
non-technical, mother tongue expressions.
Codework
is the term associated with the
literary and rhetorical practice of mixing human
and computer languages (Hayles, 2004; Raley,
2002; Cramer, 2008). Types of codework
span from intentionally arranged constructions
intended for human consumption that do
not execute on any real computer system, to
valid expressions in bona fide programming
languages that are meaningful to both human
and machine readers. Examples of the former
include the work of Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze)
and Talon Memmott, of the latter, the work of
John Cayley and Grahan Harwood (Raley, 2002;
Fuller, 2008). Rita Raley notes, however, that
of the popular electronic literature of the early
twenty first century, there is “less code per se
than the language of code.” In addition to its
infusion for literary effect, program source code
may be cited in scholarly texts like conventional
citations to explain a point in an argument.
Although it is more common to encounter screen
shots of user interfaces, examples of working
source code appear on occasion in humanities
scholarship. This study will briefly consider why
working code has been largely shunned in most
academic discourse, and then identify the types
and uses of bone fide code that do appear, or are
beginning to appear, in humanities scholarship.
Its goal is to suggest ways in which working
code – understood both as code that
works
,
and as the practice of
working
code – plays
a crucial role in facilitating digital literacy
among social critics and humanities scholars,
and demonstrate through a number of examples
how this effect may be achieved.
The first argument in favor of studying computer
code in the context of humanities scholarship
can be drawn from N. Katherine Hayles'
methodological tool of Media-Specific Analysis
(MSA). Probing the differences between
electronic and print media when considering
the same term, such as hypertext, requires
comprehension of the precise vocabulary of
the electronic technologies involved. A second,
more obvious argument comes from the growing
disciplines of Software Studies and Critical Code
Studies. If critical analysis of software systems
is to reveal implicit social and cultural features,
reading and writing program code must be
a basic requirement of the discipline (Fuller,
2008; Mateas, 2005; Wardrip-Fruin, 2009). As
the media theorist Friedrich Kittler points out,
the very concept of what code is has undergone
radical transformations from its early use by
Roman emperors as cipher to a generic tag for
the languages of machines and technological
systems in general; “technology puts code into
the practice of realities, that is to say: it
encodes the world” (Kittler, 2008). Or, following
the title of Lev Manovich's new, downloadable
book, software takes command. Yet both
Kittler and Manovich express ambivalence
towards actually examining program code in
scholarly work. A third argument, which will
form the focus of this study, is reached by
considering the phenomenon of
technological
concretization within computer systems and
individual software applications. According
to Andrew Feenberg, this term, articulated
by Gilbert Simondon, describes the way
“technology evolves through such elegant
condensations aimed at achieving functional
compatibilities” by designing products so
that each part serves multiple purposes