Writing Degree Zero

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The past few weeks of my digital research seminar has been spent trying to define the digital humanities and the role English academics can play in this hybrid field. Most of the us in the class have little technical experience with digital media beyond the interface. As a result most are reluctant to identify themselves as digital humanists, even if they study digital artifacts.

Last night, though, we had an engaging discussion about Critical Code Studies from a pedagogical perspective. Two texts in particular, Michael Mateas’s “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner” and Mark Sample’s “Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames” provided the foundation of this discussion.

These texts were well received because, for once, collectively we felt comfortable entering the DH conversation. This was odd since we identify ourselves as non-programmers. According to Mateas, procedural literacy is “the ability to read and write processes, to engage procedural representation and aesthetics, to understand the interplay between the culturally-embedded practices of human meaning-making and technically-mediated processes.” This was promising. If code is indeed an expressive medium that calls into question the role of authorship, audience, aesthetics, and such; then we do have something to offer.

Mark Sample’s piece gave us an opportunity to discuss how non-programmers might approach procedural literacy. Sample’s text examines the procedural rhetoric of crime in the game Micropolis. He argues that a close reading of underlying code can teach non-programming students how code can conceal and regulate human-interaction.
From this discussion, some interesting questions were brought up.

Here are a few:

• How does one gain access to the source code of games?
• Would limited access to open-source code create a CCS canon?
• If a media scholar were to make Call of Duty, for instance, an object of study, would their analysis be incomplete because he or she does not have access to proprietary source code?
• Who would teach a procedural literacy course? graduate students? specialists?
• What department would such a course be housed if it were a general education requirement?
• What would a procedural literacy Gen Ed curriculum look like?

While some students were still reluctant about teaching CCS without prior knowledge of a programming language, everyone understood the potential of engaging with procedurality. Those who were most reluctant likened the teaching of code to the discomfort of teaching grammar to ENC1101 students. While we didn’t get to definitive answers to the above questions. We understand that these questions are important and need further attention.