[NTG-context] To Any Software Users: Collective Identity and Software-Based Creative Practitioners

[NTG-context] To Any Software Users: Collective Identity and Software-Based Creative Practitioners

[Riviera Taylor via ntg-context]

Dear list,

I am writing to you as I recently published a Master's thesis upon
graduating from the Experimental Publishing degree programme at the
Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy. 'To Any Software
Users: Collective Identity and Software-Based Creative Practitioners'
was written in ConTeXt and is licensed under a Cooperative Non-Violent
Public License.

The thesis puts forward the position that performance-oriented
activities are integral to building positive sentiment amongst
creative, software based collectives. I emphasise the importance of
feminist and collaborative practices as a remedy against the
deleterious effects that software can have on individuals. This stance
is fleshed out in response to the apparent contradiction between the
ideals of software on the one hand, and its susceptibility to
offensive applications and violent appropriation on the other. The
argument is re-iterated in the choice of a public license which
prohibits aggressive, discriminatory and other malevolent uses of the
text and source code.

It occurs to me that such community building practices carry weight in
this context. I am reminded, for example, of the placid atmosphere
which arose during a soroban making workshop at the 18th Annual
ConTeXt meeting last year. And I appreciated the conversation which
ensued following the live coding x typesetting performance I gave at
the same meeting. While I do not discuss these moments in the body of
the text I found them thought-provoking.

Structurally, the single-document algorithm was crafted over the
course of several sleepless nights by me (another detrimental aspect
of software which too many are familiar with: losing sleep...)
It playfully refuses a \starttext ... \stoptext structure which
generates a non-fatal error in the logs. The document is read by
luametatex from top to bottom and utilises buffers in a reflexive,
performance-oriented way. That is, the main.tex file passed to the
luametatex programme gets overwritten during the runs; the buffers are
saved to files and the computational medium is thus
foregrounded. These actions demonstrate the ephemerality of the source
code and invite a performative interpretation of ConTeXt- but enough
about the workflow.

I'm optimistic that parts of the source code could be useful to the
ConTeXt distribution. For example, it was necessary to write code that
might be useful as a basis for a Harvard referencing bibliographical
style (based on London Southbank University's Harvard Referencing
Style guidelines). To my understanding such a template is not a part
of the distribution yet, but, for example, APA is. I think this would
be a valuable contribution which could encourage or facilitate more
arts-based researchers to engage with the ConTeXt software.

I would like to offer my thanks to everyone involved in the 
development of ConTeXt!

You can read the thesis here:

https://project.xpub.nl/routers-are-computers/thesis.pdf

and find the source code here:

https://git.xpub.nl/XPUB/project.xpub.nl/raw/branch/master/routers-are-computers/main.tex

Kind regards,

Riviera


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