Not just for Geeks
Matthew Kirschenbaum has a thought-provoking essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Why humanities students should learn to program.
A key part of his argument lies in doing away with the stereotype of programming as little more than cubicle-bound nerds hunched over keyboards and engrossed in incessant, tedious cycles of debugging software. He analogizes this to the same way that English Department faculty are often viewed by many on the outside as doing nothing more than correcting grammar. The push here then is to see programming as fundamentally a creative act.
But why? How? He points us to Donald Knuth’s famous tome (The Art of Computer Programming), and draws from his own experience to explain that programming is about model-making and that the rich variety of programming languages gives the writers of these programs more than one way to construct these different models in much the same way that novelists, for example, have many different ways of constructing a story line. So in programming, there are different ways to envision the model of a word-processing program or spreadsheet program (hence the historical battles between Microsoft and all its open source and proprietary competitors). Then, of course, there’s also the increasing popularity of that epitome of digital, model-making, namely, virtual words (Second Life).
Understanding these virtual worlds, he explains, requires a “procedural rhetoric, or procedural literacy.” For me, this procedural rhetoric seems like a descriptive chronology of choices and movements, or a script, made by game-players, or characters, in the virtual world. Terms like rhetoric, characters, and scripts are, of course, very familiar to those of us in English and the Humanities. And so some initial questions that spring to mind are, What are the scripts being constructed by the characters in these virtual worlds? How are these scripts being influenced by rhetorical situations within these virtual domains? How is our understanding or perception of the real and virtual influenced by the shifting back and forth between these two spaces? These questions don’t seem like the sole purview of geeks.
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Second Life, Chronicle of Higher Education, Matthew Kirschenbaum