Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing

by Annette Vee

Overview

How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts.

The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analogy and argues that it can be an apt rhetorical frame. The theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts. Viewing programming from the perspective of literacy and literacy from the perspective of programming, she argues, shifts our understandings of both. Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious.

Vee examines the ways that programming is linked with literacy in coding literacy campaigns, considering the ideologies that accompany this coupling, and she looks at how both writing and programming encode and distribute information. She explores historical parallels between writing and programming, using the evolution of mass textual literacy to shed light on the trajectory of code from military and government infrastructure to large-scale businesses to personal use. Writing and coding were institutionalized, domesticated, and then established as a basis for literacy. Just as societies demonstrated a “literate mentality” regardless of the literate status of individuals, Vee argues, a “computational mentality” is now emerging even though coding is still a specialized skill.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262036245
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	07/28/2017
Series:	Software Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Annette Vee is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Computer Programming as Literacy 1

1 Coding for Everyone and the Legacy of Mass Literacy 43

2 Sociomaterialities of Programming and Writing 95

3 Material Infrastructures of Writing and Programming 139

4 Literacy for Everyday Life 179

Conclusion: Promoting Coding Literacy-Lessons from Reading and Writing 215

Notes 227

Bibliography 293

Index 323

What People are Saying About This

Ellen Cushman

Coding Literacy presents a social-material analysis of writing and coding/programming as constitutive of everyday life and its inequities. A timely and engaging work, Vee's book is a conversation starter for colleagues across computer and engineering sciences, education, and humanities disciplines. Readers across these disciplines will be energized to take up the responsibilities we have to help shape a better future together with coding literacy.

Matthew Fuller

Annette Vee's Coding Literacy is lucid, inspiring, and avidly researched—a remarkable contribution to debates around computing as culture and on the forms of knowledge in contemporary society.

Endorsement

Annette Vee's Coding Literacy is lucid, inspiring, and avidly researched—a remarkable contribution to debates around computing as culture and on the forms of knowledge in contemporary society.

—Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

From the Publisher

Coding Literacy presents a social-material analysis of writing and coding/programming as constitutive of everyday life and its inequities. A timely and engaging work, Vee's book is a conversation starter for colleagues across computer and engineering sciences, education, and humanities disciplines. Readers across these disciplines will be energized to take up the responsibilities we have to help shape a better future together with coding literacy.

—Ellen Cushman, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Diversity and Inclusion, Northeastern University; coeditor of Literacies: A Critical Sourcebook, second edition and The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People's Perseverance

Annette Vee's Coding Literacy is lucid, inspiring, and avidly researched—a remarkable contribution to debates around computing as culture and on the forms of knowledge in contemporary society.

—Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London