Literacies Unseen: Why the Sub-Screenic World of Computer Code, Data, and Algorithms Demands Literacy Researchers' Attention

• In Event: 18.070 - Interrogating the Multiple Meanings of Digital Literacies

Abstract

The term “digital literacies” makes a false distinction between the digital and literacies. This ontological falsehood--that what it means to be digital is distinct from literacies--has led literacy researchers to treat digital technologies as instrumental: distinct tools used as part of a composition process and, while making possible exciting new composition processes, literacies remain a separate conceptual entity affected by the digital. In fact, what it means to be digital is inherently language-based. One cannot separate digital and literacies because the very nature of digital-ness is one of networked languages, both human and computational. Anything one does with a digital technology is mediated and shaped (Berry, 2011) by the languages that comprise software. It is this linguistic characteristic that has led software theorists to refer to the “language of new media,” (Manovich, 2001), to compare computer code to the politics speech (Cox, 2013), to counterintuitively declare that “paper shapes software” (Frabetti, 2015), to compare computer code to poetry (Berry, 2011), and, most ominously, to compare software to a teetering Tower of Babel that no one author can possibly understand (Kittler, 1997).

In the twenty years since the New London Group (1996) drew the field’s attention to the inherent interplay between technology and literacies (famously plural), literacies researchers have mostly fixed their attention on the use of digital devices to engage in communicative practices above the screen, even as we have refined our understanding in terms of multiliteracies, multimodality, new literacies, digital literacies, and transliteracies (Alvermann & McLean, 2007; Gee, 2007; Gerber & Abrams, 2014; Hicks, 2009; Jewitt, 2006, 2009; Kress, 2003; Mills, 2010; Moje, 2009; Author 1, in press; Vasudevan, Schultz, & Bateman, 2010). For example, much rich work has been done studying multimedia and multimodal composition practices where children might tell stories through the use of digital apps and editing software. What researchers have yet to consider, however, is how literacy practices occurring below the screen--perhaps referred to as sub-screenic literacies--also operate. How is software composed? What languages (computational and human) are used to compose software? Whose interests and ideologies are encoded into the software we use? How do sub-screenic literacies shape learning and teaching? What does it mean to critically research sub-screenic literacies? With these questions in mind, this talk will build upon work done in software theory and critical software studies (Author 4) in order to offer a conceptual mapping of sub-screenic literacies; demonstrate methods for exploring sub-screenic literacies like computer code, data structures, and algorithms; and will propose ways to move forward as a field.

Author

• Tom Liam Lynch, Pace University