# WWWRITING WITH WIT

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## Intent

This site is intended to introduce humanities research writers how to write text in a modern fashion using their computers. The aim of the lessons listed below are points of departure for the practice of writing text using simple, basic yet advance systems and technologies. Part of this endeavour is first and foremost to empower writers to use these systems in presenting simple didactic material working towards bootstrapping their understanding of writing technologies and help them develop a new type of literacy (albeit an electronic one). Another goals of this site is to present the historical trajectories of modern writing systems by emphasising on their phylogenesis. Computerised writing systems and related methods (as we will see) have a long history following that of writing itself; the double-valance between the practice of writing and the mode of inscription (technologies) is an important (research) topic in the humanities (Pontin 2012; M. Kirschenbaum 2013; M. G. Kirschenbaum 2012; Kittler 1990).

## Philosophy

The idea in compiling this site-lesson is two fold:

1. Present an alternative to the use of proprietary software for writing academic texts:

   Considering the hegemonic use of proprietary software to write academic and non-academic texts (MS Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, etc.) it is important to underline alternatives as these software not only “hide” their inner workings to scrutiny but most importantly may fall short in providing writers with adequate functionality required in writing academic texts.1 Obfuscation is impractical (and problematic) obviously so for academics in the Humanities.

   We believe in texts that we can read, that is, we will utilise (as much as possible) software which is made “open” for us to read the source code and formats that are human-readable as opposed to solely machine-readable. Hence, throughout the lessons, we will be inspecting files and writing ones that are augmented with special codes that machines can understand. This idea of writing "meta-data" into the text or more precisely markup text in a file is very important in making sure the text is human and machine readable.

2. Offer a glimpse into methods, practices and systems of software writing:

   As you may already know, writing software is primarily a textual-based practice. Writing code is all about text, keyboards, text editors, line count, syntax and the likes. Hence an important amount of systems and technologies have been devised for the composition of software (as text). From syntax highlighting to version control, these systems have a long history and can possibly provide academic writers with powerful literary tools that can enable them to bolster their prose.2 In exposing (and historicising) these systems our objective is for the reader to relate to modern software writing systems not as merely a tool but as system with a culture. In no way we expect readers to become "programmers", far from this, we would rather present them the basics of writing text using (modern) computer systems while hoping that they'll develop a critical stance on these systems' genesis, conditions, limitations and capabilites.

## Scheme

The current site is segmented in six lessons covering the (very) basics of writing academic texts on a computer.3 The overall composition of these lessons is by no mean derived from obscure "Principles" or (even worst) "Best-practices" but rather stand as loosely coupled set of lessons that can be traversed all together (or not) in a short period of time. The site is neither a manual nor a manifesto and should be seen as a starting point into further developing (creative) technics and methods in text writing.

- Lesson 1: Text Encoding

  Covers fundamentals of representation of text looking up how text is encoded/decoded as data. We will be using Sublime Text as an editor.

- Lesson 2: CLI or the Command Line Interface

  Presents how one can manipulate files and issue computing commands using what is known as a terminal.

- Lesson 3: Markup / Markdown

  Introduces a markup language (Markdown) that is used to format and annotate text.

- Lesson 4: (Text/Document) Processor

  Introduces a text / document processor (Pandoc) which converts files written in a format into another.

- Lesson 5: Bibliographer

  Looks at how to compile and maintain a bibliography using open source software (Zotero) and export references into a document.

- Lesson 6: Styling

  Discuss how to style (colour, margins, cover image, etc.) a given output from the text / document processor

As a final note worth mentioning (before delving further): all the lessons of this site, including this page, have been (are) written using the aforementioned encodings and systems. Hence, for the curious, the reader can lookup the files, modify and compile them to bootstrap their writing project. Whatever you see on this site is made available for you to read, modify, etc.

## References

Cox, Geoff. 2013. Speaking Code: coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression. Software Studies. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2013. “The Book-Writing Machine.” Slate, March. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/03/len_deighton_s_bomber_the_first_book_ever_written_on_a_word_processor.html.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2012. Mechanisms: new Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press.

Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford University Press.

Montfort, Nick. 2014. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1))[semi-Colon] [Colon] GOTO 10.

Pontin, Jason. 2012. “How Authors Write.” MIT Technology Review. http://www.technologyreview.com/review/429654/how-authors-write/.

1. Literally fall short of basic features– i.e. can’t format a bibliography for example– or disable these features by design as Antifeatures.↩

2. As a side note, for those who are interested in reading about code as poetry (and more) — please refer to recent work by Cox (2013) and Montfort (2014).↩

3. That is, writing text on a computers in 2015.↩

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