I’d only heard of twitterbots once before this evening, and that was from an academic friend with more than a toe in the digital humanities pond. So Matt’s work tonight was very helpful.

I was struck by the way in which he did several things at once. Sure, he helped us follow a functional arc of code rooted in libraries and the sine qua non of digitalia, copy/paste. And boy did he define a host of terms, such as API and ASCII and Unicode, while leaving some opaque (such as “web scraping”). But he also unfolded bits of “brogrammer” lore (his word) and touched upon points of cultural critique, such as the corporate desire to index our online avatars to our consumptive bodies.

He reminded me of a foreign language instructor with whom I am currently taking a class (beginning Turkish). She shows us with infinite patience how a difficult yet extremely regular grammar functions at a code-like level, and intersperses this work with cultural asides in rapid-fire frames. In both cases I see a translation from semiotic domain to semiotic domain, to use a term from Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Critical learning, Gee claims, is a matter of both internal and external design grammars — both the content within the design space afforded by a given domain, and the ways of thinking, acting, and being that constitute that domain in the social sense (which many of us felt was spottily addressed by Bogost’s Persuasive Games).

So . . . am I a critical twitter-botter? Hell no. On a functional level, I was able to make the code work only with the hearty assists on offer in the workshop – the boilerplate code, the scaffolded instruction, the chance to ask questions, the comestible goldfish. Even so, I felt able to grasp some of the contours of what we were doing. I wasn’t just copying & pasting blindly, but instead thinking about the shareable nature of Python code, the value of open source libraries, and how so much of the latticed software constituting my humble bots is out there, above the virtual cloud, hosted at its corporate core by twitter to be sure, but working in concert with github, various trouble-shooting sites, and google voice (which provided my bot’s digits).

I had several word files open in which I excitedly took notes. Gee writes that “[a]mplication of input is highly motivating for learning.” I’d been easily stymied in my private sojourns up Mount Python, yet was still able to benefit from the workshop, so I’d say our foray into botland was a fine example of the amplification of input principle.