Writing and rhetorics of code or #wrcode: On field-building
This late morning I posted some tweets about Apple's ridiculous non-standard practices to serve up Apple touch icons or favicons. As I tweeted about the resource, I paused for a moment to think that this sort of material could be studied in some diverse ways by scholars in writing and rhetoric, who all carve up different dimensions of code/coding.
On Twitter, Kevin Brock started a #rhetcode hashtag, and I started a #writcode hashtag. So, why not combine the two as #wrcode, I thought. I tagged some folks in the tweet seen below. Brock wanted me to expand on my reasoning, so this post attempts to do just that. (Please note that I wrote this post in haste, as I was at home with my kids. I wrote it up while preparing dinner!)
@lndgrn @anetv @cbdilger @techairos @estee_beck @timlockridge @jamesjbrownjr go on...
— Kevin Brock (@brockoleur) October 14, 2015
Since 2009, over the course of my graduate school experience (MA to now PhD candidacy), I've been trying to come to terms with how I theoretically understand writing activity and rhetorical practices, generally. More specific to my own research goals, I have been crafting an epistemology in tandem with how to research programming as a form of writing. I have been pouring over different humanities approaches to understanding computer programming in ways that compliment and differ from traditional knowledge domains in the computing sciences and social sciences. Many of the people that I tagged in the tweet above are scholars crafting their own epistemologies in fields such as Literacy Studies (Vee), Rhetoric and Software Studies (Brown), Rhetorical Genre Studies (Brock), Rhetoric and surveillance (Beck, Hutchinson), the intersection between Composition Studies and coding (Dilger, Lockridge), and my epistemology with its own lineage.
Of course, these bins are not this tidy, but they represent my interpretion of these scholars' more particular epistemological aims to understand code, coding, or, as others frame it, as computational media. Writing and rhetoric more broadly conceived is the more common disciplinary ground that we all share. Some position themselves more in writing studies, others rhetoric. Each also combine their research aims in relation to some other discipline.
Accordingly, I thought in that small, but "pregnant pause," about a proposition. I thought: we, and of course other interested scholars who I couldn't fit into the tweet above, should find more spaces to publicly explicate how we differ, intersect, and synthesize. The hashtag, #wrcode, is but one small gesture toward larger spaces to do some field-building.
Overall, I think that such a collegiate aim will help all of us more explicitly recognize our shared disciplinary space, but also our differences. Because, if we do that task for ourselves, I think we make it easier for others to join into our growing field. And, we can make it easier for us to know how we come at and to particular projects related to programming. Perhaps, we could call such a field, "Writing and Rhetorics of Code," where we can all to work together—sometimes in very different ways.
Really, I just want to see these humanities approaches to code really take off over the next decade. This #wrcode hashtag, again, is just a small moment / thing that can help us on Twitter. Strength in (growing) numbers!
One final note. I don't mean to exclude others who have done and been doing this work for quite some time. If you're not represented here, it's more of a product of lack of time to add the breadth of work in the humanities and code/coding. I definitely know it exists and has been around since at least the 1970s (see Hugh Burns), and of course others outside of writing and rhetoric based disciplines as many of us have historicized.
Update: Regarding previous scholarship, Annette Vee put together a bibliography a few years ago. This seems like a good place to link to it, again: http://www.annettevee.com/blog/2012/06/07/proceduracy-annotated-bibliography/.