Hi!
My name is Jenae. This is what I look like:
I’m a first-year PhD student in the English Department at UC Davis and I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: I’m going to learn to code in JavaScript.
Perhaps the title of this blog is misleading: I’m not a luddite. In fact, I was born in 1988, which makes me a “digital native,” right?
Indeed, when I buy a new electronic product, I don’t read a users’ manual. I tend to dive into new products, darting between screens, pressing different buttons, and simply seeing what works and what doesn’t. Only on computers do I approach the unknown with such brazen disregard for rules.
Yet computers are governed by rules. Scripts upon scripts dictate what we see on our screens. There’s a whole language that determines why our keystrokes appear the way they do.
For a long time, I’ve been content with ignoring this “man” behind the curtain, the words, letters, and symbols that do the work of my computer before me. As a humanities student, I am often firmly content with delegating technical understanding of the world to skilled engineers. How does that stove turn on? Magic! How do magnets work? It’s a miracle! Why do objects fall to the ground? Um, gravity?
But understanding how a program works has some very tangible relevance for me. If you’re reading this, you know that writing is changing. It’s no surprise that digital communication is the primary means by which we exchange information in the 21st century and, for better or for worse, fellow luddites, that’s the way it’s going to be. I love a dusty, old book as much as the next English student, but goodness knows I’m not going to resist this pressing change in our literacy practices.
I’ve tried this once before. This past summer, I attempted to teach myself Python, partially for the professional value and partially because mentioning my interest in programming scored me a lot of messages on the online dating site, OKCupid (SIDE NOTE: it really is incredible how many men are interested in a woman who knows a technical skill. This, in and of itself, is worthy of some sociologist’s dissertation work).
I perhaps should also mention that I’ve felt hugely hypocritical for remaining absent from the blogosphere. After all, as part of my English degree program, I am pursuing what is known as a “designated emphasis” in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies (WRaCS) and plan to specifically focus my (eventual) dissertation research on digital writing practices in some way. In what way that will be, I’m not entirely sure. All I know is that our digital literacy practices have huge implications for our future study of literature and writing and I’m not about to miss out on that.
With that said, this blog will chronicle my process of becoming less of a technological noob and more of a technological neophyte. There will be some musings here about my own relationship with digital literacy, cool links/websites I find related to digital literacy and practices, and perhaps mostly my journey in learning Javascript.
I am currently working through Codeacademy‘s Code Year project to learn Javascript. Each week, Codeacademy will send me a new lesson and I will complete it within the week. Some weeks I may look like this:
Other weeks, I may look more like this:
But by making my thoughts public, I will hopefully be held accountable to push on through and avoid looking too much like this:
In the meantime, I’ll be balancing graduate school coursework, but will likely tinker with some web design as well, not only to personalize this page and make it beautiful, but also to become a more apt, savvy, and comfortable tech communicator.
See you in cyberspace!