🪴 Jachére

Summertime

May 29, 20233 min read

Summertime

Temperatures raised above 25° C, and it feels like summer. Had a few free days this Pentecost and enjoyed it after a rather dense May. I got some ugly rash on my legs, and I suspect atopic eczema because of the stress interfering with my cortisol levels. I also visited a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist specialised on neuro-feedback to see if we can work on my ADHD.

More than half of the deliverables of this university semester are handed it, and I’m not too worried about the rest. I still have to do a multi-modal more-than-human piece on the beaver family living nearby. Last week I had an intermittent presentation on it and received good feedback. Until the end of June I’ll work on the piece as well as a text accompanying the film.

I also started working on treating a code repository as a source for research, and applied some distant reading. The process was arduous, but first insights are unfolding.

My research colleague Yannick Rochat shared the essay Structured Procrastination with me, and I liked it a lot. It’s a fitting piece with Deadlines as Technology. It seems that the tools of the mind are as important as the organisational tools.

I also republished my MA Design wiki, which I had archived. But with Codeberg static pages, it was so easy to publish it.

  • Talking (to) Things: A comparative exploration of voice assistants as assistive technologies for blind people

Among other reads, I finished The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I enjoyed reading it, but can’t make much of it otherwise. It seems like a reflection on the anarchist freedom.

Distant reading and computing history

I have a few first thoughts on treating a code repository as source for distant reading methods. There are two imminent aspects

  1. I’m not very experienced in corpus analysis, and it shows
  2. Despite being written for humans and machines, source code heavily leans to the latter and eludes from being analysed by the likes of Voyant tools

There is an interesting part in Mark C. Marino’s early text on Critical Code Studies about source code being double coded, which he picked up at Mateas and Montfort.

Ultimately, they conclude that “All coding inevitably involves double coding. ‘Good’ code simultaneously specifies a mechanical process and talks about this mechanical process to a human reader”

I’m not convinced, tools like Voyant can deal with such double coding, being made for texts for human consumption only.

I thoroughly enjoyed this primer on how old computer graphics worked:

I’m trying to slowly getting into understanding the technological side of old computer or video game graphics. If I want to do some proper design rhetorics I will need to get my hands dirty as well, sooner or later, and not just analyse.

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