On Sat, 2015-02-14 at 12:58 -0700, Tom Johnson wrote: > Some interesting observations by a young journalism developer.
There seem to be some connections between journalism and software development. There are uber-hard debugging problems that may have some of the qualities of investigative journalism. Typically one cannot turn over every rock, but it helps to turn over a lot of them. It's easy to become convinced of things that aren't true and stick with bad hypotheses for too long yet it's also important to tolerate weak evidence knowing that it is weak. It's important to have good background knowledge to imagine different ways what happened could have happened. In some situations it is important to expect that every step will be a struggle. On the synthesis side, I think it diverges more. While it can be useful to make programs `accessible', those that solve harder problems (in my opinion) have minimal redundancy. One learns how to work with them because they have a design built in to them and this means use of compact language throughout. It is not necessarily a good thing to have programs any random person can hack on without any investment. Yes, it is easier to get people engaged with programs that do things in obvious ways, and do obvious things many times, but that does not necessarily mean the project will move faster. It just means there is a lot of make work and conspicuous activity. The craft of unpacking a dense abstraction and system of constraints -- the `essence' -- and explaining how it came to be and why it is important might be more along the lines of journalism. Good technical writers have these skills, but they probably aren't pigeonholed as `just' technical writers if they do. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
