ERIC Number: ED523386
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2010
Pages: 247
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: ISBN-978-1-1243-6711-8
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Proceduracy: Computer Code Writing in the Continuum of Literacy
Vee, Annette
ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison
This dissertation looks at computer programming through the lens of literacy studies, building from the concept of code as a written text with expressive and rhetorical power. I focus on the intersecting technological and social factors of computer code writing as a literacy--a practice I call "proceduracy". Like literacy, proceduracy is a human facility with an expressive technology. I construct my literacy framework from several different perspectives in literacy studies, including the sociocultural-focused perspective of New Literacy Studies scholars such as Brian Street and James Paul Gee as well as the technology-focused perspective of literacy from Jack Goody and Christina Haas. Conceptual and contemporary portraits of proceduracy place it within a longer social and technological history of literacy, beginning with the transition of text into the infrastructure of English society in the 11th-13th centuries and continuing through the push for mass textual literacy in the 18th-20th centuries. I begin by setting up conceptual parallels between the writing of traditional text and code, demonstrating how intertwining technological and social forces shape them both. In Chapter 2, I provide specific examples of expressive and social code-writing in workplaces and open source software communities. Chapter 3 examines our current moment--when code is central to our daily lives, but proceduracy is not yet a mass literacy--in light of a parallel transition with the technology of writing in 11th-13th century Europe. Once text and code become part of society's infrastructure, the literacy that allows one to use these technologies becomes important Chapter 4 posits textual literacy and proceduracy as literacies that are based on writing technologies both infrastructural and connected to power. I conclude by exploring the pathways to and implications of mass proceduracy. Literacy, with its basis in texts, implements, and surfaces of writing, has always been technological. This dissertation offers a literacy studies approach to the process-encoding literacy that is evolving with and manifesting itself so powerfully in the technology of computers. This new theoretical approach may help to intervene in the currently restricted distribution networks of proceduracy. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
Descriptors: Computer Software, Computers, Programming, Foreign Countries, Educational Technology, Coding, History, Technological Literacy, Correlation, Information Technology, Writing Skills
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Publication Type: Dissertations/Theses - Doctoral Dissertations
Education Level: N/A
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Language: English
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