Raphael Hemme

Raphael Hemme

Web Developer & Anthropologist of Science and Technology

About

This is an experiment in blogging.

About me:

Hi! My name is Raphael.

I’m a cultural anthropologist and also a web and app developer. I just recently graduated from a coding bootcamp and while having learned so much throughout that program and in the few weeks since, there is obviously still a lot of things to learn or consolidate. And because it is much more fun and also much more efficient to learn new things while documenting and sharing them, I decided to take up blogging as a way to do exactly that.

About the blog:

TL:DR:

This experiment in blogging is intended to document the many little things I learn about both, culture and coding - and especially the point of their convergence: the cultures of coding and computational culture more widely.

Given some time, I hope that associations and aggregations emerge from the many small or even atomic notes that will constitue the content of this blog. That is what I call “semantic molecules”.

This is a journey!

I hope to encounter a lot of interesting things, meet new people on the way and get to know them better. So, in a way, it is the usual working mode of anthropology - of being a “professional stranger” (Agar 1980). Although, I would emphasize the relative strangeness over the professionalism for this project. :slightly_smiling_face:

This kind of learning also requires making mistakes. So please let me know if something is wrong in a code snippet, a description, or a summarized argument or simply if something could be improved! But please be patient and kind.

Order!

So, back to the content: Again, this blog is intended to store insights I gain on my coding journey as well as summaries, takeaways or thoughts on topics and sources I encounter in my everyday life and in my academic work. The latter could be anything from inspiring talks, books, articles, blog posts, films, exhibitions or podcasts and so on.

In order to systematize the content a bit, I will use two main categories1 for posts:

  • coding practice
  • cultures of computing2

Aside from that, it is probably useful to have a third category for all the other stuff that might come up. :wink: Let’s call it:

  • float.3

Thinking about the name semantic molecules, I must admit that it is quite long. So if you can’t remember the name, maybe just abreviate it to “semi-cule” and pronounce it “semi cool”. :wink: At least it might help retention.

  1. Being strongly influenced by praxeography, this should not, however, be considered a clear demarcation of theory and practice etc. but just a simple enough systematization to allow me (and possibly you too) to find posts that will be quite different in their respective goals and styles. ↩

  2. “cultures of computing” is a direct reference to Susan Leigh Star’s (et al.1995) volume: “The cultures of computing” ↩

  3. You may read that as a reference to the trouble I had trying to align things correctly in the css / scss files I customized for this blog from the minimal mistakes theme, which uses floats extensively. Since I am much more used to flexbox and grid systems, floats - for me - never tend to work the way I expect them to. Which is quite a nice analogy, because this is probably the same for thoughts and texts that I can’t fit in this evil, rigid system of “coding practice” and “cultures of computing”. ↩