Coding Diversity, Diversities of Code presents the methods, processes, and preliminary findings of our ongoing investigations into the explicit and implicit rhetoric of the global conversation on inclusion and diversity in technology fields and professions. In this study, we examine current (2015 -2016) web documents addressing diversity among post-secondary computer science faculty and technology professionals in the United States, as compiled in two primary data sets: a) individual pieces of long- and short-form online journalism on the subject and b) social media texts produced by self-identified computer science and technology professionals from underrepresented groups, including active tech bloggers and hobbyists. Through a combination of close readings of individual texts; analytics including sentiment analysis, text clustering, and lexical analysis; and visualizations, we seek to reveal features of these texts’ vocabularies, rhetorical and affective strategies, and semantic patterns. We will remain alert to any evidence of potential conscious and unconscious bias, relationships, or patterns within and between the corpora.
Building a more effective, diverse, egalitarian culture in computer science and technology is a long game, requiring lasting interventions at every level of education and culture. Our cross-disciplinary team is committed to this purpose and to serving the academic and professional communities through research projects that result in utility beyond their present purposes: in this case, effective, reusable, publicly available code, data, methods, and documentation. Through the lenses of our individual disciplinary approaches—and their convergence on our shared research subject—we provide novel perspectives on the structures underlying the cultural discourse on diversity in technology and a useful case study of a conscious collaboration between computational and humanistic research methods. We hope that the methods and tools we develop in the process will empower others to undertake their own investigations.
