a journal of software studies
Introduction On a cold night in Ulm, Germany on November 10, 1619, René Descartes received a series of dreams in which a ‘mirabilis scientiae fundamenta’ was revealed to him. As he recounts in his autobiography A Discourse on Method, this foundation for a wonderful science was to be built upon mathematics and promised to unite …
Continue reading “Artificial Rhetorical Agents and the Computing of Phronesis”
Introduction PowerPoint is installed on more than a billion computers.1 It is the indispensable medium for presentation, one of the most ubiquitous software applications in the world. It has likely been used to raise more money than any other tool in history.2 Teachers rely on PowerPoint. Elementary schoolchildren make presentations and so do researchers in …
Continue reading ““One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech”
1. Introduction Since the introduction of LOGO in the 1960s, educators and technologists have been creating open-ended, “sandbox” style computational media; what Mizuko Ito has labeled the “construction genre” of educational technology. 1 Examples include MIT’s Scratch, CMU’s Alice, UC-Boulder’s AgentSheets, and a wide variety of similar systems that are designed to teach math and …
Introduction “In the new millennium, and notably after 2005, as a citizen of more or less massively networked information societies, one has already been interacting enough beyond command-lines, menus, desktops, and GUIs to have realized that another set of models is operative, and that there is at this point an obvious need to pursue analyses …
Continue reading “From WIMP to ATLAS: Rhetorical Figures of Ubiquitous Computing”
Introduction /* No one is born happy. */ pcity -> ppl_happy [0] = 0; city.c, FreeCiv In her essay ‘Should We Name the Tools?’ Carolyn R. Miller identifies a contradictory impulse within the history of rhetoric. On the one hand, a rhetor strives to conceal the deliberate use of rhetorical art (techné) in order to …
Rhetoric and Computation What might rhetoric and computation illuminate when we view them together? At first glance, rhetoric and computation may seem like strange bedfellows, but they both find roots in philosophies of rigorous reasoning and symbolic logic. How might we systematize knowledge and communicate it accurately? How do we break complex patterns and ideas …
Continue reading “Rhetoric Special Issue Editorial Introduction”
Issue Five Introduction Special Issue, Rhetoric and Computation Annette Vee &James J. Brown, Jr., Editors, Special Issue Introduction Steve Holmes, Can we name the tools? Ontologies of Code, Speculative Techné and Rhetorical Concealment John Tinnell, From WIMP to ATLAS: Rhetorical Figures of Ubiquitous Computing Kevin Brock, The ‘FizzBuzz’ Programming Test: A Case-Based Exploration of …
Cybernetics poses questions to history and historiography. It is consequential then for a book on the history of cybernetics, like this one, to embrace the circuitous method of its object of research. Sentences are repeated. Experiments and pioneering ideas echo each other across the chapters, with long-distance short-circuits and micro-epiphanies for the reader’s joy. A …
Introduction: From hidden power to explicit vision Edgerank is an algorithm that composes the sequence of posts on a Facebook user’s News Feed, which is the first page one meets after logging in to Facebook. The name and existence of Edgerank is relatively well known, but in comparison to Google’s Pagerank algorithm1, very little research …
To exist is to be indexed by a search engine. Introna & Nissenbaum, 20001 Figure 1: Google’s Knowledge Graphs for Stokely Carmichael, c. March, 2014 (Left) and c. September, 2015 (Right) On May 16th, 2012, Google officially announced the launch of its Knowledge Graph. In the announcement, Google wrote that the Knowledge Graph was introduced …
Continue reading “Graph Force: Rhetorical Machines and the N-Arization of Knowledge”
Introduction For the last several decades, rhetoric has increasingly been understood to play a significant role in communication occurring not just in discursive speech and writing acts but across numerous modes of meaning-making, including image, color, gesture, spatial arrangement, aurality, and procedure. For rhetoricians, recognizing that meaning is created and communicated across these modes serves …
Introduction Not long ago, I pulled my smartphone from my pocket, unlocked the screen, and selected the icon of a nutrition analysis app. The app’s splash screen flashed into view, greeting me with a clear logo set against a crisp backdrop, and I waited patiently for the app to finish loading. But instead of transitioning …
Introduction The canoes glide slowly and noiselessly, punted by men especially good at this task and always used for it. Other experts who know the bottom of the lagoon … are on the look-out for fish. . . . Customary signs, or sounds or words are uttered. Sometimes a sentence full of technical references to …
Continue reading “Sensing Exigence: A Rhetoric for Smart Objects”
Prologue: Gödel and Turing In 1936, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society published a paper authored by a young Cambridge Fellow, Alan Turing. This essay, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’,1 is considered today to be momentous for having stripped what was then the purely mental activity of computation down to its …
Continue reading “Incomputable Aesthetics: Open Axioms of Contingency”
In An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology Anna Munster seeks to emphasise the relational dimensions of networks and claims that we need to understand the radical implications of distributed neural architectures to gain a subtle and nuanced understanding of the contemporary condition. To this end, her book explores artistic projects, everyday …