Week 10: Finalised Product

Twine was definitely the right choice for me in the end. I progressed well with my story, easily connecting passages and bringing my idea to life. Timewise, I averaged an hour per chapter, and I wanted to include as much detail as possible with my story. Towards the end, however, I wasn’t able to invent a plot-twisting, never-saw-it-coming ending, so I settled on my second idea for the ending. This resulted in my last two chapters being quite shorter than my first two, and I’d originally intended for all my chapters to be of equal length. I don’t mind too much, as I conveyed my overall concept into Twine. I enjoyed working with Twine as it was incredibly easy to navigate through, and it suited my novice skill in coding overall.

Final story progression

There was, however, a slight issue I wasn’t able to overcome. Towards the end of my story, I wanted a specific song to play at a certain ‘option’ that the reader would choose. I researched on the Twine help guide to try and solve the issue, but I apparently needed Sugarcube to do so.

I had tried to enter in the code on Twine, and include the Youtube link of my song choice, but the text of that passage just showed up as regular text in the story, not an embedded code. After playing around for awhile, I decided that it wasn’t necessary to have the song in the background, so I scrapped the idea. Apart from that hiccup, everything turned out the way I wanted it to. If I had tried to continue with my Twitter bot, I most likely wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with it; or, I would have most likely have degressed in my progress.

Part of developing code literacy deals with the history and attitudes of code itself. Code was generally seen as this highly technical, complicated language that only geniuses could understand, and historically thought to be fit for men to understand whilst women were on the sidelines. In recognising what code today is, it’s important to appreciate the various, historical achievements in coding, as well as the people involved. Jennifer Light discussed the heavy involvement of women in major coding projects, like the ENIAC. During that time period, it’s interesting to note that women were “almost exclusively hired as computers”, as they were essentially the backbone behind the complicated coding and development of mathematical formulas (Light 1999, p. 474). During this era of automatically defaulting code as a “he” description, women were rarely recognised for their achievements in various projects; yet, women were working jobs equivalent to that of a computer (Light 1999, p. 474). Furthermore, the media failed to recognise women’s contributions to code technology. In this time, code was understood to be this revolutionary introduction to the next step in technology, and males could only solve it; however, code is understood today as this progressive technology that continues to connect society in various ways. It’s very refreshing and noteworthy to observe the changes of attitudes towards code from then. Code today is handled by both men and women, and just that statement alone demonstrates the positive development of code literacy, and brings about different perspectives to coding ideas/issues.

 

REFERENCES:

 

Light, J. S. 1999, ‘When Computers Were Women’, Technology and Culture, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 455-483.

Week 9: Change Of Mind!

After hitting the last roadblock for my Twitter Bot and endlessly researching how and why nothing was making sense, I considered the time I have left for A3 and the plausibility of actually creating a functioning Twitter Bot. The two didn’t go hand in hand. As much as I wanted to create the bot, I realised how ambitious the project was, and how illiterate I was in code. I was already getting confused with some basic command lines in Terminal, so I think that’s saying something about my code literacy. I instead decided on something that was relatively simple and very interesting to create- an interactive story on Twine!

I had watched Ben demonstrate Twine in our earlier classes, and I knew that I was capable of understanding how to link my story together. I started my new project off by thinking about my overall storyline, and how I wanted to structure it. I came up with a 5-chapter story with a rough linkage.

I ended up creating the whole chapter within an hour, and I think it’s turning out great! I did come across a few challenges in Twine, though.

I figured out (after a long while) that I needed to write “->” to connect my passages together, thanks to the Twine guide.

I wanted to italicise some font, so I experimented with a lot of symbols and combinations to try and get it, and I finally found it! My progress on Twine is a lot easier and faster than my Twitter Bot.

Earlier, I discussed the role of code in our society, and how society’s code literacy is expanding. After reading Morris and Striphas’ reading about cultural intermediaries and keywords defining our culture today, It’s obvious that we’ve hit this “algorithmic turn” in which we require technology and code for almost every function in society; it’s gone to the extent that we’ve created algorithmic codes to make recommendations for what we need based on our searches (Morris 2015, p. 449). This code acts as an intermediary between technology and our culture, as it now assists with the presentation and representation of our culture (Morris 2015, p. 450). Essentially speaking, our culture has become a result of our technological activity. I’ll take my A3 as an example. Stories were told by book or mouth some years ago; however, I’m here creating an interactive, code-programmed story online for anyone. Code’s joined the concept of a story and the concept of technology together, and resulted in a cultural shift of vocal/physical stories to algorithmic stories. I’m including kindles and online readings in this example as well. We understand algorithms to be “mathematical procedures to expose some truth or tendency about the world (Striphas 2015, p. 405). We can definitely see that tendency in our society today, in that we basically revolve around code. I feel like this understanding of algorithms is our current code literacy, but it’s always continuing to grow.

I honestly didn’t see code in this perspective when I started my story with Twine, but I can understand the viewpoint of Morris and Striphas in that code has practically become our culture, and it’s constantly joining various forms of technology to our lives.

I can’t really say if that’s a good thing though!

 

 

REFERENCES:

 

Morris, J. W. 2015, ‘Curation By Code: Infomediaries and the Data Mining of Taste’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 4-5, pp.446-463.

 

Striphas, T. 2015, ‘Algorithmic Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol.18, no. 4-5, pp. 395-412.

Week 8: More Roadblocks

This week, I only got slightly further with my Twitter bot. I didn’t have the class time to ask Ben many questions, so I thought to download setuptools myself. I had Terminal, Python, Sublime Text and the DSMCode website all open to guide me through my third try, and I surprisingly was able to download and activate a few things! It turned out that I already had setuptools downloaded.

I got slightly confused as to how to actually search for a program, so I thought to try and install it and see if my computer already had it, which it did. I tried to download the ez_setup.py script; however, when I clicked on it to copy to my clipboard, I noticed the first line stated that this script was associated with an installation for Bootstrap. I’ve heard of Bootstrap as another coding program, but I wasn’t aware that I would potentially have to work with it.

Hitting this roadblock, I thought to research other methods for creating a Twitter bot, given the programs I’ve already downloaded. I came across 2 websites which guided me through activating a virtual environment first, and then installing a Twitter ‘Tweepy’ library, which would be running with Python. This was vital to the function of the bot, as this code would provide the link to Twitter (DigitalOcean 2016). I thought this was easy enough to do, and it was successful!

After completing this step, I realised how tough this project actually is. I’m currently doubting myself as to whether I want to continue with this, as I already have a backup plan in mind. It’ll just come down to my thought process over the next week.

My understanding of code has dramatically increased, and I can’t help but reiterate the quote from Ford in that we “can make computers do wonderful things, but [we] need to understand their limits,” (Ford 2015). This resonates with my mind, in that I’ve understood my limits when it comes to coding. It’s apparent that code has become a powerful, leading factor in our everyday lives; however, the percentage of us who understand code literacy is frightfully small. I never initially questioned what code literacy actually was, but I’m now understanding it to be our entire perception of the creation of new information that it delivers (Edutopia 2012). Code is an entirely new language, as it’s something we have to continuously practice in order to effectively participate with it, but it’s not easy. The fact that I’m running into so many roadblocks and being unable to easily resolve them demonstrates the complexity and diversity code has in our lives. Code has actually become so involved in our lives that it’s had to be restricted by the law, which actually furthers our understanding of code literacy. Taking the section of privacy as an example, Lessig discussed the use of code to counteract the absence of security for online privacy, in that “trusted systems” would contain technologies that essentially protected intellectual property, such as “encryption technologies to contain the copying of CDs,” (Lessig 2003, p. 6). Using code to govern our lives allows us to understand code on a greater level, that this new, technological language is potentially running the world.

 

REFERENCES:

 

DigitalOcean 2016, How To Create a Twitterbot with Python 3 and the Tweepy Library, New York, viewed 22 September 2017,

<https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-twitterbot-with-python-3-and-the-tweepy-library>.

 

Edutopia 2012, Code Literacy: A 21st Century Requirement, Florida, viewed 22 September

2017,

<https://www.edutopia.org/blog/code-literacy-21st-century-requirement-douglas-rushkoff

>.

 

Ford, Paul 2015, What Is Code?, Brooklyn, viewed 2 September 2017,

<https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/&gt;.

 

Lessig, L. 2003, ‘Law Regulating Code Regulating Law’, Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 1-14.

Week 7: (Slight) Progress!

I’m proud to state that progress has been made for my Twitter bot! This week, after our seminar, I wanted to focus on diving into the programs and investigating how each are linked to end up creating the finished product. Google has (obviously) become my best friend at this point, as I’ve been searching up the precise instructions and code sequences to enter into Python. I stated in my previous entry that “you can make computers do wonderful things, but you need to understand their limits,” (Ford 2015). These words were represented very well this week, as I hit a major roadblock in my coding journey. According to the instructions for creating a simple Twitter Bot, I successfully created a Twitter account, easily created a Twitter app and copied my Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access Token Secret to my notes.

I hit my roadblock when I read that I had to download ‘setuptools’ for Python, and run it with the Python installation I already have. At first, I thought I had ‘setuptools’ already, so I searched on Terminal if it was anywhere on my computer. Conveniently not remembering how to navigate Terminal, I used the DSMCode website to help me remember my special letters to use.

Turns out, I don’t have ‘setuptools’. I ended up downloading a zip file that apparently had ‘setuptools’ and other helpful documents to aid me with my Twitter Bot installation, but neither of them worked nor made any sense to me. I can see my completed Twitter Bot as being a wonderful accomplishment that my computer was able to do; however, I’m experiencing the computer’s limits right now.

It’s interesting to see how the attitudes of technology, especially code, have changed over time. 20 years ago, the word ‘code’ in our heads would correspond with companies like Microsoft, Norton and Apple; whereas today, the word ‘code’ resonates with a variety of specific technologies: social media, computer science, app production, the list goes on. Historically, it was discussed that“ the number of people with some variety of online access increased from month to month; therefore, more and more people had an experience of stumbling upon something striking,” (Streeter 2005, p. 756). The many ‘striking’ revelations essentially led the change of thinking with computers and society. People were discovering the endless opportunities within the internet as well as the variety of functions computers (at their respective time) could perform. Computers and society eventually became a structure of “modern autonomous imaginative hedonism”, in which “the anticipation of pleasure becomes part of the pleasure itself,” (Streeter 2005, p. 759). Again, I’m relating back to Ford with the idea that one can make wonderful things happen with the computer. This structured way of thinking is what society today has, in that we feed our anticipation with technology by actively discovering new forms of it, specifically, code. Keeping this attitude change with technology in mind, I’ve chosen to nurture my curiosity with code by experiencing it firsthand, and developing my code literacy through the many roadblocks and accomplishments I have and will encounter.

 

 

REFERENCES:

 

Ford, Paul 2015, What Is Code?, Brooklyn, viewed 2 September 2017,

<https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/&gt;.

 

PyGaze 2016, Tutorial: Creating A Twitter Bot, United Kingdom, viewed 11 September 2017, <https://www.pygaze.org/2016/03/how-to-code-twitter-bot/>.

 

Streeter, T. 2005, ‘The Moment of Wired’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 755-779.

 

Week 6: Just Getting Started

“You can make computers do wonderful things, but you need to understand their limits,” (Ford 2015). I saw the legitimacy of this quote when I began exploring my computer through Python, Terminal and Django. It makes me slightly nervous when I periodically remember that my very own laptop has the ability to engage the world with various types of content, and it’s up to me to figure out how. In starting my journey of understanding the many processes my laptop is capable of functioning, I’ll be able to learn and quickly understand the technological limits of this 13-inch device.

One of those ‘types’ of content I wish to create is a Twitter bot that automatically tweets daily sentences/quotes/phrases; however, the pattern of the tweets is a direct correlation to the corresponding letter of the alphabet. For example, Monday’s tweet will start with an ‘A’, Tuesday’s tweet will start with a ‘B’, and so on. The tweets will range from a couplet of a poem to an interesting science fact. Literally, the tweets will be about anything as I’ll be thinking of various topics.

I stated in my presentation that I hoped to finalise my idea by the end of week 5, and get started on the developmental process by week 6. I’ve decided to stick with the Twitter bot idea; however, in terms of the initial developmental stages, not much has been achieved. Due to my lack of knowledge in the coding field, I have no idea where to start. I’ve researched on Google for the easiest and most efficient way to create a Twitter bot, and I’ve managed to download the relevant software. Though my timeline has slightly changed as of now, I hope to use class-time to research more about the function of those softwares, and use my tutor’s knowledge to guide me in writing a program for the bot.

Taking on a technical project will allow me to gain a new perspective of code. I’ll begin to see code as an integration of everyday life, as code is needed to understand how our devices work to support our convenience (Kittler 1997, p. 46). Gaining a material perspective by breaking down and understanding the core structure of our commodities allows us to understand the entire foundation behind the development, and gain insight as to how the tiny screws and perfectly-positioned bolts create meaning for us. My material perspective will observe the simple keyboard installed on my laptop, and ignite me to wonder how it’s possible at all for a code to allow me to create an online robot!

It’s seen that “the dilemma of code and language seems insoluble,” (Kittler 2014, p. 46). For inexperienced technology users, that quote is extremely correct; however, there is potential for code to become a part of users’ language, as code is existent in almost every aspect of our lives. My bot will function to provide that gateway for me, so I’m not afraid to approach code in the future.

This relates back to Ford’s statement of understanding limits with computers, as identifying the entire framework of a simple device simply shows its capabilities and limitations. I will definitely be gaining an entirely new perspective with my device and code, as I’ll be first-hand experiencing coding.  

 

REFERENCES:

 

Ford, Paul 2015, What Is Code?, Brooklyn, viewed 2 September 2017,

<https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/&gt;.

 

Kittler, F. ‘Code’, in Software Studies: A Lexicon, Fuller, M. (ed) 2008, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 40–47.

 

Kittler, F. ‘There is No Software’ in Kittler, F., 1997, Literature, Media, Information Systems, G+B Arts, Amsterdam, pp. 147-155.