Research Catalog

Title

Coding literacy : how computer programming is changing writing / Annette Vee.

Author

Vee, Annette

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 361 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm

Summary

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 couplig, 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.

Series Statement

Software studies

Uniform Title

Software studies (Cambridge, Mass.)

Subject

• Computers and literacy
• Literacy > History
• Computer literacy
• Written communication > History
• Programming languages (Electronic computers) > History
• Rhetoric > Study and teaching
• Computer programming > Study and teaching

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction : Computer programming as literacy -- Coding for everyone and the legacy of mass literacy -- Sociomaterialities of programming and writing -- Material infrastructures of programming and writing -- Literacy for everyday life -- Conclusion : Promoting coding literacy : lessons from reading and writing.

Call Number

JBE 18-528

ISBN

• 9780262036245
• 026203624X

LCCN

2016041368

OCLC

974858664

Author

Vee, Annette, author.

Title

Coding literacy : how computer programming is changing writing / Annette Vee.

Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Software studies

Software studies (Cambridge, Mass.)

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JBE 18-528