annette's dog remy
about annette

I'm an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in literacy, composition and technology. That's a picture of my dog, Remy.

I've done research on the ways that computer programming is being talked about and spread as a "literacy," and how that is (or should be) changing what we think writing and literacy are. My book Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing is published by MIT Press (MIT Press page; Amazon page). My area of speciality is literacy studies, and I use the historical and social perspective of literacy studies to help us understand current contexts for computer programming.

A good introduction to my work is my article "Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy," which summarizes some of the main points of the book. Or, if you're interested in the topic, you might like my Dec 2013 blog post, "Is coding a new literacy everyone should learn? Moving beyong yes or no," where I take up the recent campaign by Code.org to promote programming and exchange some ideas with its co-founder Hadi Partovi in the comments. Here's a 20min video outlining some of the ideologies used to promote programming as a literacy over the last 50 years, and an annotated bibliography of some of the places where programming and literacy are talked about together. If you're still interested, Tasneem Raja's Mother Jones article "We can code it!" features my research prominantly, and you can hear me join Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code and Jim Ryan of the San Francisco public schools in a San Francisco radio station's public call-in show, KALW's Your Call: Is Coding the New Literacy?

My teaching style reflects my research interest in new media writing and online genres. I often use blogs to teach writing, and you can find those blogs and syllabi linked from my teaching page on this site. Students also explore composition in images, text, video and sound in projects for my courses. I'm always happy to talk to students, current, past and prospective; email me!

Before graduate school, I was a high school teacher, a secretary at a commercial game company, and an editor on scientific manuscripts and grants for a psychiatry / neuroscience lab that does sleep research. I like reading about science and technology and I spent a lot of time online.

If you'd like to contact me, please email me at annettevee@gmail.com or find me on twitter as @anetv.