Introduction to Code as a Liberal Art, Spring 2025: Schedule

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Weekly plan: class notes, assignments, etc

Projects & written assignments:

• Unit 1 Project
• Written assignment 1
• Unit 2 Project
• Written assignment 2 & Unit 3 Project (Note: This PDF document has been updated to reflect new due dates.)
  Due dates:
  
  • Written assignment #2: Friday, May 16, 8pm
  • Unit 3 project:
    • For in-class presentation, Tuesday, May 13
    • Final draft uploaded to Google Drive, Wednesday, May 14

Shortcuts to jump down to each unit:

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

§ Unit 1: Digital formalism

• Week 1 (January 21 & 23) — 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

  • Tuesday, January 21. Slide presentation

  • Thursday, January 23. Unit 1, Lesson 1

  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 subfolder in your Google Drive folder, and put any files for the assignment in there. Please match the name of your homework folder to the name of that assignment on this page; in this case for example, "Unit 1, Homework 0". Ambiguously labeled homework folders may not receive credit if I cannot identify which assignment they are meant to fulfill. Thank you.)

  • Unit 1, Homework 0: Preparation for Thursday, January 23 technical lesson

  • Unit 1, Lesson 1 Homework: 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 Wednesday night, January 29, 8pm

• Week 2 (January 28 & January 30) — Algorithm

  Readings

  (Readings listed here are due for discussion this week. Please post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 2" by Monday, January 27, 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. This text is available here as a PDF, although that is missing the article images. For a complete version with images, you can find the text online at newmediacaucus.org.

  Class artifacts

  • Tuesday, January 28. Slide presentation

  • Thursday, January 30. Unit 1, Lesson 2: Algorithmic coding experiments

  Homework

  (Reminder that homework listed here is assigned this week as a follow up to the technical material covered in this week's lesson, linked above. 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, Lesson 2 Homework". Ambiguously labeled homework folders may not receive credit if I cannot identify which assignment they are meant to fulfill. Thank you.)

  • Unit 1, Lesson 2 Homework, due Wednesday, February 5, 8pm.

• Week 3 (February 4 & 6) — Digital formalism

  Readings

  (Remember, readings listed here are due for discussion this week. Post your comments in the reading response document under "Week 3" by Monday 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

  • Tue, Feb 4. Slide presentation

  • Thur, Feb 6. Unit 1, Lesson 3: Variability on the command line & introducing images in Python Image.

  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 3 Homework, due Wednesday, February 12, 8pm.

• Week 4 (February 11 & 13) — 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 Monday 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

  • Tue, Feb 11. Slide presentation

  • Thur, Feb 13. Unit 1, Lesson 4: Images: pixels, filtering, generating & collaging (We'll revisit randomness next week to see how to work with this concept technically in Python)

  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 4 Homework due Wednesday, February 19, 8pm.

• Week 5 (February 18 & 20) — Unit 1 project work

  • Tue, Feb 18. Seminar-Integrated Advising

    No in-person class session today. 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. Please use this sign up sheet to either meet on Feb 18 or 25: One-on-one meeting signup sheet

  • Thur, Feb 20. Unit 1, Lesson 5: Randomness and probabilities in Python, and review of last week

  Homework

  • No new coding homework this week; instead please focus your work on the Unit 1 Project and writing assignment.

• Week 6 (February 25 & 27) — Unit 1 culmination & work share

  • Tue, Feb 25. Seminar-Integrated Advising

    No in-person class session today. 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. Please use this sign up sheet to either meet on Feb 18 or 25: One-on-one meeting signup sheet.

  • Thur, Feb 27. Unit 1 project presentations

  Homework

  • No new coding homework this week; instead please focus your work on completing the final draft of your Unit 1 project code, your first written assignment, and the reading for next week.

§ Unit 2: Data epistemologies and quantitative investigations

• Week 7 (March 4 & March 6) — Beyond formalism: power, politics & race

  Readings

  • Tara McPherson, "U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX," Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White, eds, 2012
  • American Artist, "Black Gooey Universe"

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, March 4. Slide presentation

  • Thur, March 6. Unit 2, Lesson 1: Metadata and modular programming with UNIX

  Homework

  • No coding homework this week

• No class March 11 & 13 — Have a restful & restorative spring break.

• Week 8 (March 18 & 20) — Encoded inequality

  Readings

  • Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, 2019.

    • Introduction and chapter 2
    • chapters 3-5.
    Let's focus our discussion on the introduction and chapter 5. I'm also planning to bring in some ideas from chapter 2, so if you're able, please take a look at that as well.

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, March 18. Slide presentation

  • Thur, March 20. Unit 2, Lesson 2: Web scraping with a queue

  Homework

  • Unit 2, Lesson 2 Homework, due Wednesday, March 26, 8pm

• Week 9 (March 25 & 27) — Scraping and algorithmic power

  Readings

  • Taina Bucher, If ... Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics , Oxford University Press, 2018.
    I have uploaded the entire book here. Let's focus our discussion on chapter 1, titled "Introduction: Programmed Sociality". If you have time and interest, please take a look at chapter 6 ("Programming the News"), which presents some research and analysis highly relevent to the Unit 2 project.

  • Sam Levigne, "Scrapism: A Manifesto", Critical AI, 2023.

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, March 25. Slide presentation

  • Thur, March 27. Unit 2, Lesson 2: Web scraping with a queue, continued (see link above)

  Homework

  • Unit 2, Lesson 2 Homework, continued; due Wednesday, April 2, 8pm.

• Week 10 (April 1 & 3) — More on parsing & scraping HTML

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, April 1. Unit 2, Lesson 2(b): More on parsing with BeautifulSoup

  • Thur, April 3. Unit 2, Lesson 3: Building a Markov data structure.
    — Video of this lesson,
    — Searchable text transcript of the lesson.

  Homework

  • Unit 2, Lesson 3 Homework; due Wednesday, April 9, 8pm.

• Week 11 (April 8 & 10) — Distant reading and the digital humanities

  Readings

  • 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

  • Tue, April 8. Slide presentation

  • Thur, April 10. Unit 2, Lesson 4: Using a Markov chain data structure to generate text

  Homework

  • No next technical homework assigned this week. Use this time to work on your Unit 2 project

• Week 12 (April 15 & 17) — Artificial Intelligence, statistical algorithms, and data-driven governance

  Readings

  • Dan McQuillan, "Deep Learning and Human Disposability," Logic magazine, issue 17, August 22, 2022 [PDF]
  • Xiaochang Li, "'There's No Data Like More Data': Automatic Speech Recognition and the Making of Algorithmic Culture", Osiris 38 (July 1, 2023), 165–82.

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, April 8. No slide presentation today

  • Thur, April 10. Unit 2 Project 1 presentations

  Homework

  • No next technical homework assigned this week. Use this time to complete & upload the final draft of your project, and start the reading for next week.

§ Unit 3: Network linkages (More links coming soon.)

• Week 13 (April 22 & 24) — Origins of the hyperlink and the knowledge worker

  Readings

  • 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 — I will also screen some excerpts in class. Part 1, part 2, part 3
  • Apple's early HyperCard platform
  • Many eLit projects
  • Many other examples listed in the slide presentation for this week.
  • Paul Otlet, The Mundaneum
  • Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas
  • Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu
  • Oulipo
  • Our shared Miro board about the prehistory of hypermedia. (Login to Miro here, via New School SSO.)

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, April 22. Slide presentation. (This includies a link to HyperCard materials at archive.org.)

  • Thur, April 24. Unit 3, Lesson 1: Introduction to HTML

    I hope to get through this today as well: Unit 3, Lesson 2: Introduction to CSS

  Homework

  • Unit 3, Lesson 1 Homework, due Monday, April 28, 8pm (Note: HW due Monday this week.)

• Week 14 (April 29 & May 1) — Building network structures (project work in HTML, CSS, and Javascript)

  Please note: no readings this week. We will have two technical lessons instead. Please use this time to work on the Unit 3 project and to develop your ideas for the final paper.

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, April 29. Unit 3, Lesson 3: Adding interactivity with Javascript

  • Thur, May 1. Unit 3, Lesson 4: More interactivity with Javascript, and project help

  Homework

  • No homework today, other than to work on the second written assignment and Unit 3 Project (see link above)

• Week 15 (May 6 & 8) — Digital materiality & infrastructural visibility

  Readings ... and a screening

  Please prepare to discuss both of these, but make sure you give enough time to the Holt & Vonderau piece, which I hope we'll spend more discussion time on, and which I think will be more useful to you in regards to the final paper.

  • 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"

  • If you are still feeling a little confused about what a "platform" is specifically, or how you might write analysis of one, or if you just feel like you could use some extra help thinking through the final paper, you might want to take a look at this text: Plantin, Lagoze, Edwards and Sandvig, "Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook", New Media & Society, 2016

  • (Optional.) Jean-François Blanchette, "A Material History of Bits"
  • (Optional.) Paul Dourish, "Protocols, Packets, and Proximity"

  Screening

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

  Class artifacts

  • Tue, May 6. Slide presentation
  • Thu, May 8. Unit 3, Bonus Lesson: Mouse-over word swapping

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

• Week 15.5 (May 13, make-up day) — Project presentations

  • Tue, May 13. Project presentations

• Optional reading response topics

  The following two groups of readings were originally planned for weeks 14 & 15, but for various reasons they got bumped. I'm happy to consider them both optional for anyone who would like extra credit. Reading response grades will be determined based on 10 total required reading responses. If you have missed any of those consider doing either or both of these as a make-up. (You're welcome to submit this as extra credit if you have completed all 10.)

  I encourage you all to read these texts, as they are fascinating and build on ideas we've been talking about the last couple weeks, but we will not dedicate extended time in class to a full discussion. If you would like to discuss any of these ideas I would be happy to in office hours.

  — Materialites of the digital

  Readings

  • 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 (ping, traceroute)

  — The digital rocks: minerals, mines, and computational ecology

  Readings

  • 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
  • The Small File Media Festival

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