Code as a Liberal Art, Spring 2021: Schedule

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Weekly plan: class notes, assignments, etc

§ Unit 1: Digital formalism

• Week 1 (January 20) — Introductions & course overview

  • Introductions
  • About the course

  Class artifacts

  • Weds, Jan 20. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps (Note: I will include text transcripts along with all of our Zoom recordings. My intention is that this might help you find specific moments of our class session more easily: the text transcripts should be searchable [hit ⌘-F on Mac or CTRL-F on Windows] which will lead you to timestamps that you can use to jump to that moment in the video. The timestamp format is HOUR:MINUTE:SECONDS.MILLISECONDS), group chat log

  Homework

  (Homework listed here are assigned this week as a follow up to the hands-on, technical material covered in class this week. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there.)

  • Unit 1, Exercise 1, due Tuesday, January 26, 8pm

• Week 2 (January 25 & 27) — Algorithm

  Readings

  (Readings listed here will be due for discussion this week. Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 2" by Monday, Sunday January 24, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  Please note: This originally misstated January 24 as a Monday. It is a Sunday. Apologies for any confusion. If you haven't posted yet, please do so as soon as you can. You won't be marked late this week. In general, readings will be due Sunday night, to discuss in class Monday.
  • Andrew Goffey, "Algorithm", from Software Studies, a Lexicon, Matthew Fuller, ed.
  • Christian Sandvig, "Seeing the Sort: The Aesthetic and Industrial Defense of 'The Algorithm'", Media-N, Fall 2014: V.10 N.03

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, Jan 25. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  • Preparation for Weds, Jan 27 class lesson

  • Weds, Jan 27. Unit 1, Exercise 2: Algorithmic coding experiments & the Python Image Library. Class notes, Zoom recording with subtitles, text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  Homework

  (Remember that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the in-class technical lesson. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there.)
  • Unit 1, Exercise 2: Assignment, due Tuesday, February 2, 8pm

• Week 3 (February 1 & 3) — Digital formalism

  Readings

  (Remember, readings listed here will be due for discussion this week. Post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 3" by Sunday 8pm.)
  
  • Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media , 2002. Chapter 1 (pages 18-55). For those of you who have already read this, perhaps consider looking at "Prologue: Vertov's Dataset" (pages xiv-xxxvi) or "The Language of Cultural Interfaces" (pages 62-93) which will be relevant both to unit 1 and later parts of our class.
  • More excerpts from Software Studies, A Lexicon, Matthew Fuller, ed.: "Code" (Friedrich Kittler), "Glitch" (Goriunova & Shulgin), "Pixel" (Graham Harwood). I have also included "Codec" here by Adrian Mackenzie. Consider it optional. For those of you who have already read "Code", maybe you'll want to read this one instead.

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, Feb 1. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  • Weds, Feb 3. Unit 1, Exercise 3 lesson: Images and files; encoding, decoding, transcoding; glitch. Class notes, Zoom recording, searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  Homework

  (Remember that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the in-class technical lesson. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there.)
  • Unit 1, Exercise 3: Assignment, due Tuesday, February 9, 8pm

• Week 4 (February 8 & 10) — The aleatory in computation

  Readings

  (Readings due for discussion this week. As usual please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 4" by Sunday 8pm.)
  
  • Nick Montfort et al, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); GOTO 10, Introduction (pgs 2-17) & chapter 40 (pgs 133-160), "Randomness". This book has a website (10print.org) where you can find a complete PDF under a Creative Commons license.
  • (Optional.) Aden Evens, "Digital Ontology and Example", from The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, Peter Gaffney, ed. (2010). I think the more philosophically-inclined among us will likely enjoy this theoretical discussion of these ideas.

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, Feb 8. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  • Weds, Feb 10. Unit 1, Exercise 4 lesson: Randomness; shaping probability distributions; working with files. Class notes, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  Homework

  (Remember that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the in-class technical lesson. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there.)
  • Unit 1, Exercise 4: Assignment, due Tuesday, February 16, 8pm

• Week 5 (February 17) — Unit 1 culmination & work share

  No readings this week.

  • Mon, Feb 15. No class today (Presidents' Day)

  • Weds, Feb 17. Unit 1 work share. Complete your work as outlined in the Unit 1, Exercise 4 homework assignment: prepare to discuss your peer code review, and share your work!

  Homework

  • There was no homework assigned this week since we had work presentations instead of a technical lesson. The only thing you need to work on for next week (besides the reading) is to do your Unit 1 synthesis / write-up.

    As the syllabus states "Each unit will culminate with you synthesizing the exercises in some way (you might extend some of them, or merge two together) and writing a 1-2 page reflection on the techniques that you’ve learned, linking them to the readings and class discussions for that unit." As we discussed in class (see the Mon, Feb 22 Zoom recordings) you should use this write-up as an opportunity to conjoin knowledge that you've gained so far in both our conceptual and technical discussions. How has the hands-on work for this unit offered you deeper insights into the conceptual material? And how has the conceptual material offered richer context around the hands-on techniques that you've been learning? Please integrate discussion and citation of at least two of our readings from this unit. Feel free to reference back to your reading responses for any of these texts.

    Due Friday, Feb 26, 8pm. Please upload these to your Google folder, named as "Unit 1 write-up".

§ Unit 2: Data epistemologies and quantitative investigations

• Week 6 (February 22 & 24) — Encoding inequality

  Readings

  (As always, readings listed here are due for discussion this week. Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 6" by Sunday, February 21, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  

  What and how to read this week: Let's please focus on the Benjamin book and the Eubanks article. For the article titled "Metadata," I only expect you to read the first part of this document — I hope you can make it through sections 1 - 4.1. This piece is written from the perspective of information science — a field associated with the organization of knowledge such as libraries, archives, and databases. The two articles from Wired magazine are background for the technical work of Unit 2. We'll look at images from the Mallonee article in class.

  • Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, 2019, Introduction and chapter 5

  • Virginia Eubanks, "Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities", 2014 (or read online at prospect.org)
  • "Metadata" by Matthew Mayernik, isko.org
  • Scott Rosenberg, "How Google Book Search Got Lost", 2017 (or read online at wired.com — subscription required)
  • Laura Mallonee, "Is That a Hand? Glitches Reveal Books' Human Scanners, 2019 (or read online at wired.com — subscription required)

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, Feb 22. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  • Weds, Feb 24. Unit 2, Exercise 1 lesson: Experiments with data, data structures, and metadata (image Exif data). Class notes Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  Homework

  (As always, homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the in-class technical lesson. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment there.)
  • Unit 2, Exercise 1: Assignment, due Tuesday, March 2, 8pm

• Week 7 (March 1 & 3) — Syntax solutionism

  Readings

  (Readings due for discussion this week. Please post comments in the reading response document under "Week 7" by Sunday, February 28, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  

  • Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed (2010), pages 7-27

  • Miriam Posner, "JavaScript is for Girls", Logic magazine, March 15, 2017. (PDF available here.) Also check out the other references that are linked in the sentence that reads "innumerable articles and books have pointed out but".

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, March 1. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), and group chat log. Zoom is still processing the text transcript (as of Mar 10) - I will upload when ready.

  • Weds, March 3. Unit 2, Exercise 2 Lesson: Web scraping, and visualizing network diagrams. Class notes, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  Homework

  (Remember that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the in-class technical lesson. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there.)
  • Unit 2, Exercise 2: Assignment, due Tuesday, March 9, 8pm

• Week 8 (March 8 & 10) — Distant reading and the digital humanities

  Readings

  (Readings due for discussion this week. Please post comments in the reading response document under "Week 8" by Sunday, March 7, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  
  • Kathryn Schulz, "What is Distant Reading?", New York Times (June 2011) (PDF available here)
  • Lauren Klein, "Distant Reading After Moretti" (2018)
  • James Lee, "Opening the Anthropocene Archives" (Feb 8, 2021)
  • Tanya E. Clement, "The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining", from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
  • Tressie McMillan Cottom, "More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology, also from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, March 8. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  • Weds, March 10. Unit 2, Exercise 3 lesson: Trees. Class notes, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  Homework

  (Remember that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the in-class technical lesson. Please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there.)
  • Unit 2, Exercise 3: Assignment, due Tuesday, March 23, 8pm

• No class March 15 & 17) — Have a restorative spring break!

• Week 9 (March 22 & 24) — Algorithmic power

  Readings

  Please note: We're changing up the schedule a little this week. The reading will be due Tuesday night, for discussion in class on Wednesday. Next week we'll return to our usual schedule with readings due on Sunday night for discussion Monday, and Wednesday as a technical work (Unit 2 presentations).

  (Readings listed here will be due for discussion this week. Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 9" by Tuesday, March 23, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  
  • Taina Bucher, If... Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics . I've uploaded the entire book, but please focus on chapter 1 ("Introduction") and chapter 6 ("Programming the News")

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, March 22. Technical topics review — welcome back from break

  • Weds, March 24. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  Homework

  • No new homework assigned this week since we used class time to review past lessons. Use this time to work on past Unit 2 exercises, in preparation for your Unit 2 work share. I will post some guidelines about what to present.

• Week 10 (March 29 & 31

  No in-person group meetings this week. Instead we will be meeting one-on-one for our Integrated-Advising Seminar sessions. Please see the sign up sheet and select a time slot for our meeting.

• Week 11 (April 5 & 7) — Data discrimination; Unit 2 culmination & work share

  Readings

  (Readings listed here will be due for discussion this week. Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 11" by Sunday, April 4, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  
  • Open Technology Initiative's Data Discrimination: Collected Essays. I've included the entire PDF here, but please focus on:
    • Christian Sandvig, Kevin Hamilton, Karrie Karahalios, and Cedric Langbort, "An Algorithm Audit", pages 6-10
    • Virginia Eubanks, "Big Data and Human Rights", pages 48-52
    • Solon Barocas, "Putting Data to Work", pages 58-62

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, April 5. Slides (we did not view these in class). Instead we reviewed some technical material in preparation for Wednesday. We examined and debugged this file from Nancy: gistfile1.py. Archive of part of the class session is available here as: Zoom recording, searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  • Weds, April 7. Unit 2 culmination & work share

  Homework

  • There is no homework assigned this week since we had work presentations instead of a technical lesson. The only thing you need to work on for next week (besides the reading) is to do your Unit 2 synthesis / write-up.

    As the syllabus states "Each unit will culminate with you synthesizing the exercises in some way (you might extend some of them, or merge two together) and writing a 1-2 page reflection on the techniques that you’ve learned, linking them to the readings and class discussions for that unit." As we discussed in class (see the Mon, Feb 22 Zoom recordings) you should use this write-up as an opportunity to conjoin knowledge that you've gained so far in both our conceptual and technical discussions. How has the hands-on work for this unit offered you deeper insights into the conceptual material? And how has the conceptual material offered richer context around the hands-on techniques that you've been learning? Please integrate discussion and citation of at least two of our readings from this unit. Feel free to reference back to your reading responses for any of these texts.

    Due Tuesday, April 13, 8pm. Please upload these to your Google folder, named as "Unit 2 write-up".

§ Unit 3: Network linkages

• Week 12 (April 12 & 14) — Origins of the hyperlink and the knowledge worker

  Readings

  (Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 12" by Sunday night and prepare to discuss these texts in class on Monday this week.)
  
  • Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", LIFE magazine version, September 1945
  • Theirry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Chapter 5: "SRI and the oN-Line System", 2000
  • Miriam Posner, "How Is a Digital Project Like a Film?" from The Arclight Guide to Media History and the Digital Humanities. I've included the whole book here, but please only focus on pages 184-194.
  • (Optional, if you wish to read more about the so-called "Mother of All Demos".) Claudia Salamanca, "The Mother of All Demos", 2009

  Examples

  • "The Mother of All Demos," 1968; Excerpts, to screen in class. Part 1, part 2, part 3
  • Apple's early HyperCard platform
  • Many eLit projects
  • We could even think of David Foster Wallace here: Infinite Jest, with its excessive overuse of notes, references of references, and epistolary material, could itself be considered a kind of hypertext.
  • Paul Otlet, The Mundaneum
  • Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas
  • Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu
  • Oulipo
  • The Miro board for breakout group research into the above four examples.

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, April 12. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  • Weds, April 14. Unit 3, Exercise 1 lesson: The hyperlink, HTML, and CSS. Class notes, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, group chat log

  Homework

  (Homework is assigned as a follow up to this week's in-class technical lesson. As always, please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment there.)
  • Unit 3, Exercise 1: Assignment, due Tuesday, April 20, 8pm

• Week 13 (April 19 & 21) — Materialites of the digital

  Readings

  (Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 13" by Sunday night and prepare to discuss these texts in class on Monday this week.)
  
  • Jean-François Blanchette, "A Material History of Bits"
  • Paul Dourish, "Protocols, Packets, and Proximity"

  Examples

  • Demo of command line tools for investigating network routing and protocols

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, April 19. No slide presentation today. Instead we worked through the "Pre-history of Hypermedia" examples listed above in Week 12, and we collaboratively produced this Miro board in breakout groups. Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  • Weds, April 21. Unit 3, Exercise 2 lesson: More CSS and multimedia (images, video, audio). Class notes, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  Homework

  (Homework is assigned as a follow up to this week's in-class technical lesson. As always, please create a new, clearly named folder for each assignment in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment there.)

  • Unit 3, Exercise 2: Assignment, due Tuesday, April 27, 8pm

• Unit 3 synthesis project

• Week 14 (April 26 & 28) — Infrastructural explorations

  Readings

  (Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 14" by Sunday night and prepare to discuss these texts in class on Monday this week.)
  
  • Ingrid Burrington, Networks of New York, 2016. Excerpts available here as a PDF, and a complete version is available here as an ePub if you have the proper viewer.
  • Jennifer Holt & Patrick Vonderau, "Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure"

  Screen

  • Ben Mendelsohn & Alex Chohlas-Wood, "Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors", vimeo.com, 2011

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, April 26. Two slide presentations today: Week 13, on digital materialities and Week 14, on infrastructure. Zoom recordings: Video with subtitles, searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  • Weds, April 28. Unit 3, Exercise 3 lesson: Adding interactivity with Javascript. Class notes, Zoom recording with subtitles, searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  Homework

  • Unit 3, Exercise 3: Assignment, due Tuesday, May 4, 8pm

• Course evaluations! — Please complete course evaluations for our class and all your classes this semester.

• Week 15 (May 3 & 5) — The digital rocks: minerals, mines, and computational ecology

  Readings

  (Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 15" by Sunday night and prepare to discuss these texts in class on Monday this week.)
  
  • Sean Cubitt, "Does Cloud Computing Have a Silver Lining?", 2011
  • Jeffery Mantz, "Improvisational economies: Coltan production in the eastern Congo", 2008
  • Other writing by Ingrid Burrington:
    • After Supply Chain Capitalism, Data & Society, 2020
    • (Optional.) "A rare and toxic age", increment.com, 2018
    • (Optional.) "Sand in the Gears", thecreativeindependent.com, 2018

  Examples

  • Low-Tech Magazine, "How to Build a Low-tech Internet", 2015
  • The Computing within Limits conference
  • The Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, May 3. Slide presentation, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

  • Weds, May 5. Unit 3, Exercise 4 lesson: More JavaScript techniques. Class notes, Zoom recording (with subtitles), searchable text transcript with timestamps, and group chat log.

• The list of links to all student websites. Remember to please find a way to create two links within your site to classmates: one to the person who follows you alphabetically, and one other person based on a semantic link or some other association. The second link can be something very specific like from a word, image, or sentence on your site linking to a page on their site, or it can be something more broad, like a link from your home (index) page linking to their entire site, or anything in between.

• Week 16 (May 10) — Final project presentations

  Monday, May 10: In-class project presentations.

  Final project and write-up due Friday, May 14, 8pm.

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