write.as

Readings

Students read Paul Ford's sprawling and hilarious essay “What is code” before this session. In addition, they read “Sleep-Worker’s Enquiry” and “The Agile Labor Union,” two texts that helped make the link to a subsequent session on digital labor.

Lecture

I briefly lectured on the topic of “code as culture,” which related the idea that “software is eating the world” to Weber's iron cage before talking about code in relation to practices, aesthetics, and status & power hierarchies.

This was probably a bit confusing, but I think it got across the idea that we can frame code and coding as continuations of long-term cultural developments and in relation to bread-and-butter topics of critical anthropological research.

We’re writing a bot!

I gave the following instructions:

In your team, write code that generates a semi-random saying for your bot to broadcast out into the world.

Take notes as you create your bot. Each team member will write about your bot-making experience from a different perspective (about 400 words each):

• The designer’s perspective: How did approach the problem? (specification)
• The coder’s perspective: How did you solve it? (implementation)
• The user’s perspective: How does it work? (documentation)

I demoed a small script that I had written that output random silly sayings. In retrospect I should have explained what a bot is a bit more because they weren't really familiar with Twitter bots and the like.

They worked in small groups. I told them to open repl.it and start a Python project unless they had prior knowledge of another programming language. I also told them about devdocs.io, but for the most part they turned to Youtube for tutorials. They also encountered Stackoverflow and other sites as they googled for how to do various things. This gave them a sense of what Ford calls the “entire civilizations” contained in programming language communities.

How it went

Almost universally, they went from being bewildered and frustrated to having a breakthrough and getting excited about what they were making. They were all able to create something — though in some cases I gave them some pretty strong hints that they wanted to write from random import choice in their scripts, that they wanted to use string formatting, lists, etc.

Some students missed the class and couldn't write follow-up assignments asking them to reflect on their experience. For them I made an instructional video. That doesn't really put them in a position of having to figure stuff out by themselves though.