Code as a Liberal Art, Spring 2023: Schedule

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Weekly plan: class notes, assignments, etc

1. Unit 1
2. Unit 2
3. Unit 3

Written assignments:

• Written assignment 1
• Written assignment 2 and Unit 3 final project

§ Unit 1: Digital formalism

• Week 1 (January 23 & 25) — Introductions & course overview

  • Introductions
  • About the course
  • What does it mean to think of code as a liberal art? What does it mean to think like a computer?

  Class artifacts

  • Monday, January 23. Slide presentation

  • Wednesday, January 25. We spent today installing software on everyone's machine and only a few minutes talking about coding concepts.

  Homework

  (Homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the technical material covered in this week's tutorial. For each homework please create a new, clearly named subfolder in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there. For example, "Unit 1, Homework 1". Ambiguously labeled homework folders may not receive credit if we cannot identify which assignment they are meant to fulfill. Thank you.)

  • Unit 1, Homework 0: Preparation for Wednesday, January 25 technical lesson

  • Unit 1, Homework 0, Part B: Install day exercises. Some simple exercises to get familiar with files and running code, and to test that your system has been setup correctly. Due Tuesday night, January 31, 8pm

• Week 2 (January 30 & February 1) — 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 Sunday, January 29, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  • 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

  • Monday, January 30. Slide presentation

  • Wednesday, February 1. Unit 1, Lesson 1: Algorithmic coding experiments. (If we get far enough, I will also post Unit 1, Lesson 2 ("Seeing" algorithms), here as well.)

  Homework

  (Reminder that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the technical material covered in this week's tutorial. For each homework please create a new, clearly named subfolder in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there. For example, "Unit 1, Homework 2". Ambiguously labeled homework folders may not receive credit if we cannot identify which assignment they are meant to fulfill. Thank you.)

  • Unit 1, Lesson 1 Homework, due Tuesday, February 7, 8pm. (If we get far enough, I will also share Unit 1, Lesson 2 Homework.)

• Week 3 (February 6 & 8) — 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). If anyone has 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 6. Slide presentation

  • Weds, Feb 8. Unit 1, Lesson 2: Image, pixels, and files; encoding, decoding, transcoding; glitch. Please note additional notes have been provided to add clarifying explanation for these topics in: Unit 1, Lesson 2, Part B (also linked below)

  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, Lesson 2 Homework, due Tuesday, February 14, 8pm

• Week 4 (February 13 & 15) — 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 13. Unit 1, Lesson 2, Part B: Revisiting images, pixels, files, glitch. This lesson should help you complete Unit 1, Lesson 2 Homework above, which is still due Tuesday, February 14, 8pm.

  • Weds, Feb 15.

    • Let's revisit Unit 1, Lesson 2, Part B again and try to get through the rest of it before moving on.
    • Reading discussion: we ended up not having time in class for a sustained discussion of these texts, but here are some slides I put together for our conversation. Thank you all for your reading responses.
    • Unit 1, Lesson 3: Randomness; shaping probability distributions; working with files.

  Homework

  (Remember, 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, Lesson 3 Homework, due Tuesday, February 21, 8pm

• Week 5 (February 22) — Unit 1 culmination & work share

  No readings this week.

  • Mon, Feb 20. No class today (Presidents' Day)

  • Weds, Feb 22. Unit 1 work share. Complete your work as outlined in the Unit 1, Lesson 3 Homework assignment (linked above): prepare to quickly share your work!

  Homework

  • There was no new homework exercise assigned this week since we had work presentations instead of a technical lesson. Instead of any new coding exercises, the only thing you need to work on for next week (besides the reading) is to do your Unit 1 short paper.

    Due Wednesday, Feb 28, 8pm. Please upload these to your Google folder, named as "Unit 1 short paper".

• Unit 1 short write-up

  Assignment prompt (PDF). As stated in that document, your paper should be 1000-1500 words; due Friday, March 10, 8pm. Please submit Microsoft Word or Google Docs only. No PDFs. Name your file “Writing assignment 1”, include your name at the top of the file, and submit your work to your folder on Google Drive.

§ Unit 2: Data epistemologies and quantitative investigations

• Week 6 (February 27 & March 1) — Encoded 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 night 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  

  What and how to read this week: Our discussion will focus on the Ruha Benjamin book so please start there and prioritize that. This is a recent and very influential book that touches on many really important ideas for the study of digital technology. I will use class time to explain and unpack some of these terms, but first try your best to understand them in your reading. I've included the introduction and chapter 2. We'll come back to this book and read chapters 4 adn 5 in a few weeks.

  In addition to that, take a more casual look at the article titled "Metadata," and for this I only plan to talk about sections 2 and 3 as linked in the table of contents. 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 2.

  • "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 28. Unit 2, Tutorial 1 Lesson: Experiments with data, data structures, and metadata (image Exif data).

  • Weds, Mar 2. Slide presentation for our reading discussion

  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, Tutorial 1 Homework, due Tuesday, March 7, 8pm

• Week 7 (March 6 & 8) — Syntax solutionism

  Readings

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

  • (Skim. Don't spend too much time on this piece. You'll be able to surmise the main thesis from a cursory read. The ideas of this piece are not what I'm hoping to be our main takeway this week. As you'll quickly see, the other two articles offer much more critical and nuanced takes on the questions raised by this first text. So I recommend trying to get the main idea of this piece, which you can probably do from the Preface, and move on to the other articles.) Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed (2010), pages 7-27

  • Janet Abbate, "Code Switch: Alternative Visions of Computer Expertise as Empowerment from the 1960s to the 2010s", Technology and Culture, 2018. (Optional: another excellent text by this author on this subject: "Coding is Not Empowerment", chapter 12 from Your Computer is On Fire, 2021.)

  • 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".

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, March 6. Presentation slides from our reading discussion

    Some videos:

    • "Turtle Graphics in BASIC" on an Apple II, by Gordon Henderson. We watched this for a couple minutes starting at 2:20 (the link should take you to that point) and then jumped around to some later moment.
    • "What Most Schools Don't Teach", by Code.org. This video is mentioned in the Abbate text. I was hoping to share it with you but we didn't have time.
    • "A 12-year-old app developer", by TED.com. We didn't talk about this, but it is apropos of the Mark Zuckerberg video that we watched.

  • Weds, March 8. Unit 2, Tutorial 2 Lesson, Web scraping, and visualizing network diagrams.

  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, Tutorial 2 Homework, due Tuesday, March 21, 8pm.

• No class March 13 & 15 — Have a restorative spring break!

• Week 8 (March 20 & 22) — 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, 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 20: Slide presentation

  • Weds, March 22. Unit 2, Tutorial 3 Lesson: Web scraping review and work on our Markov algorithm, starting with our Markov data structure

  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, Tutorial 3 Homework, due Tuesday, March 28, 8pm

• Week 9 (March 27 & 29) — Algorithmic power

  Readings

  (Readings listed here will be due for discussion this week. Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 9" by Sunday, 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 27: Slide presentation

  • Weds, March 30. Unit 2, Tutorial 4 Lesson: More data scraping (notes to come)

  Homework

  • Unit 2, Tutorial 4 Homework (link to come), due Tuesday, April 11, 8pm for peer review

• Week 10 (April 3 & 5) 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, 8pm, and prepare to discuss these texts in class this week.)
  
  • Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology, chapters 3-5. This PDF includes three chapters (Thanks, Solstice!), but let's focus our discussion on the final chapter, chapter 5, which is PDF pages 43-68 (document page numbers 109-134).
  • (Optional.) 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 3. Class slide presentation

  • Weds, April 5. Unit 2 Lesson 5 (Notes to come)

  Homework

  • Unit 2 culmination requirements (link to come)

  • 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 short paper.

    Due Friday, April 14, 8pm. Please upload these to your Google folder, named as "Unit 2 write-up".

• Week 11 (April 10 & 12) —

  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.

§ Unit 3: Network linkages

• Week 12 (April 17 & 19) — Origins of the hyperlink and the knowledge worker

  Readings

  Note:Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 12" by Tuesday night and prepare to discuss these texts in class on Wednesday 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
  • (Optional.) 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; Feel free to watch on your own, but I will screen some excerpts 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
  • Here is a link to the shared Miro board that we will use for our breakout group research into the above four examples.

  Class artifacts

  • Mon, April 17. Slide presentation. (Includes link to HyperCard materials at archive.org.)

  • Weds, April 19. No technical lesson this week

  Homework

  • No homework assigned today.

• Week 13 (April 24 & 26) — 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 24. Slide presentation.

  • Weds, April 26. Unit 3, Lesson 1: Introduciton to HTML

  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, Tutorial 1 Homework, due Sunday, May 1, 8pm. The homework for today (as we discussed in class) was simply to review the above technical lesson, and to create five HTML pages using the template linked from the above notes. Fill that template in with some content (you can use Lorem ipsum or something else), and create links between them. Each page should have at least two links so that you a person could browse and navigate to reach each page. We didn't get to the section of the lesson on including images, but if you're up for it, read through my notes and try including some images. We'll start with this topic on Weds next week.

• Week 14 (May 1 & 3) — 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, May 1. Slide presentation

  • Weds, May 3. Today in class we continued the discussion on the readings from last week and this week, reviewing the slide presentations for Weeks 13 & 14.

  Homework

  • The only technical homework for this week is to continue what was assigned above in Week 13.

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

• Week 15 (May 8 & 10) — The digital rocks: minerals, mines, and computational ecology

  Readings (optional)

  (Readings and reading responses for this week are optional. I encourage you all to read these texts, as they are fascinating and build on ideas we've been talking about the last couple week. But we will not dedicate extended time in class to a full discussion. If you feel like you need additional credit for readings, completing this optional response would count for one earlier response that you may have missed. If you wish to do an optional response, post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 15" by Sunday night.)
  
  • 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 8. Unit 3, Lesson 2: More CSS and multimedia (images, video, audio)

    Unit 3, Lesson 2 Homework (due Tuesday night, May 9):

    1. Create a new folder for this week's assignment (call if "Unit 3 Lesson 2" or similar) and copy over all the HTML files that you created last week. (If you'd prefer, feel free to create new ones, but make sure they have links to each other as before.)
    2. Create a CSS file that creates the layout from the lesson, modify that layout any way you'd like. Add some other rules that specify the appearance of your HTML, such as fonts and colors.
    3. Link to this CSS file from all of the HTML files that you've created. Add/modify HTML to those files so they have a consistent look & layout across all of them.
    4. Add one piece of multimedia (image, audio, video) to each file. As indicated in the lesson, put these multimedia files in the appropriate subfolders.
    5. Add this new folder to your Google Drive.

  • Weds, May 10. Unit 3, Lesson 3: Adding interactivity with Javascript.

  • Bonus lesson. Unit 3, Lesson 4: More JavaScript techniques ("hamburger menu", emphasizing multimedia)

• List of links to all student websites to come. I will be asking you to create two links within your site to classmates based on a semantic link or some other association. The link can be from something very specific like 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 15) — Final project presentations

  Monday, May 15: In-class project presentations.

  Final paper due Weds, May 1, 8pm.

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