Submitted by Dr E. McPherson on Wed, 23/07/2014 - 14:07
In June, I participated in the inaugural Critical Coding course put on by Cambridge's Digital Humanities Network and Computer Laboratory. Our background reading included the Critical Engineering Manifesto, which includes the statement: "The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings...."
The course was a great introduction to coding and to the critique of code. My collaborator from the Computer Laboratory, Meredydd Williams, and I also started developing a platform, called The Whistle, for citizen witnesses' reporting of human rights violations. You can see a blurb about our project and those of our classmates here, as well as a longer blog post about the aims of The Whistle here.