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2024-11-18
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An application programming interface (API) is both a gateway to and a conduit for data. Every internet session invokes APIs and the software code that support them. Despite (or perhaps because of) their ubiquity, they suffer from what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin term “immediacy”: being a “medium whose purpose is to disappear” (20). APIs are rich with various configurations of human-computer language and, therefore, are crucial for understanding how meaning is made on computer-mediated platforms (i.e. personal computers, mobile phones, gaming systems). Through an investigation of human and computer languages that move through a particular set of APIs—Stack Exchange’s questions and answers APIs and GitHub’s repository APIs—this project offers the “cyborg episteme” as a theoretical lens to scaffold analyses of literate developments that emerge. The resulting findings suggest that APIs exert greater influence on online communities’ literate behaviors than their apparent lack of presence might suggest.
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English