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Participants: Derya Akbaba * Ben Allen * Natalia-Rozalia Avlona * Kirill Azernyi * Erin Kathleen Bahl * Natasha Bajc * Lucas Bang * Tully Barnett * Ivette Bayo * Eamonn Bell * John Bell * kiki benzon * Liat Berdugo * Kathi Berens * David Berry * Jeffrey Binder * Philip Borenstein * Gregory Bringman * Sophia Brueckner * Iris Bull * Zara Burton * Evan Buswell * Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield * Brooke Cheng* Alm Chung * Jordan Clapper * Lia Coleman * Imani Cooper * David Cuartielles * Edward de Jong * Pierre Depaz * James Dobson * Quinn Dombrowski * Amanda Du Preez * Tristan Espinoza * Emily Esten * Meredith Finkelstein * Caitlin Fisher * Luke Fischbeck * Leonardo Flores * Laura Foster * Federica Frabetti * Jorge Franco * Dargan Frierson * Arianna Gass * Marshall Gillson * Jan Grant * Rosi Grillmair * Ben Grosser * E.L. (Eloisa) Guerrero * Yan Guo * Saksham Gupta * Juan Gutierrez * Gottfried Haider * Nabil Hassein * Chengbo He * Brian Heim * Alexis Herrera * Paul Hertz * shawné michaelain holloway * Stefka Hristova * Simon Hutchinson * Mai Ibrahim * Bryce Jackson * Matt James * Joey Jones * Masood Kamandy * Steve Klabnik * Goda Klumbyte * Rebecca Koeser * achim koh * Julia Kott * James Larkby-Lahet * Milton Laufer * Ryan Leach * Clarissa Lee * Zizi Li * Lilian Liang * Keara Lightning * Chris Lindgren * Xiao Liu * Paloma Lopez * Tina Lumbis * Ana Malagon * Allie Martin * Angelica Martinez * Alex McLean * Chandler McWilliams * Sedaghat Payam Mehdy * Chelsea Miya * Uttamasha Monjoree * Nick Montfort * Stephanie Morillo * Ronald Morrison * Anna Nacher * Maxwell Neely-Cohen * Gutierrez Nicholaus * David Nunez * Jooyoung Oh * Mace Ojala * Alexi Orchard * Steven Oscherwitz * Bomani Oseni McClendon * Kirsten Ostherr * Julia Polyck-O'Neill * Andrew Plotkin * Preeti Raghunath * Nupoor Ranade * Neha Ravella * Amit Ray * David Rieder * Omar Rizwan * Barry Rountree * Jamal Russell * Andy Rutkowski * samara sallam * Mark Sample * Zehra Sayed * Kalila Shapiro * Renee Shelby * Po-Jen Shih * Nick Silcox * Patricia Silva * Lyle Skains * Winnie Soon * Claire Stanford * Samara Hayley Steele * Morillo Stephanie * Brasanac Tea * Denise Thwaites * Yiyu Tian * Lesia Tkacz * Fereshteh Toosi * Alejandra Trejo Rodriguez * Álvaro Triana * Job van der Zwan * Frances Van Scoy * Dan Verständig * Roshan Vid * Yohanna Waliya * Sam Walkow * Kuan Wang * Laurie Waxman * Jacque Wernimont * Jessica Westbrook * Zach Whalen * Shelby Wilson * Avery J. Wiscomb * Grant Wythoff * Cy X * Hamed Yaghoobian * Katherine Ye * Jia Yu * Nikoleta Zampaki * Bret Zawilski * Jared Zeiders * Kevin Zhang * Jessica Zhou * Shuxuan Zhou

Guests: Kayla Adams * Sophia Beall * Daisy Bell * Hope Carpenter * Dimitrios Chavouzis * Esha Chekuri * Tucker Craig * Alec Fisher * Abigail Floyd * Thomas Forman * Emily Fuesler * Luke Greenwood * Jose Guaraco * Angelina Gurrola * Chandler Guzman * Max Li * Dede Louis * Caroline Macaulay * Natasha Mandi * Joseph Masters * Madeleine Page * Mahira Raihan * Emily Redler * Samuel Slattery * Lucy Smith * Tim Smith * Danielle Takahashi * Jarman Taylor * Alto Tutar * Savanna Vest * Ariana Wasret * Kristin Wong * Helen Yang * Katherine Yang * Renee Ye * Kris Yuan * Mei Zhang
Coordinated by Mark Marino (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), and Zach Mann (USC). Sponsored by the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (USC), and the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons (UCSB).

Code Critique: analysing code from a website

Comments

  • edited January 2018

    @markcmarino, @belljo, @evan_schauer @jeremydouglass. Please I need answer and suggestions, How can I analyse a website's code, for example, the natural language points out its hegemony over another another natural language via criticizing algorithm and coding of French website?

  • edited January 2018

    Hi Waliya,

    If I understand your question, you are interested in power relations between two natural languages on a website -- French and something else. Is the other language e.g. English, or is it a language like Hausa, or something else?

    Here are some general approaches to questions of language and power on a website, with an eye towards considering the impact or context of web technology and code:

    • Character encoding issues (e.g. unicode): For example, can users type the characters of their chosen language into site interfaces such as comment or search boxes? If they leave comments, are those characters displayed correctly in their comments? If they search fields, does searching by those characters return correctly indexed results?
    • Code: In HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and/or PHP et cetera think about how the code itself is written, e.g. these languages generally use English vocabulary
    • How was the website made: are the code comments written in French, by French-speaking programmers, or in some other way? What language(s) were the software frameworks, content management systems, templates etc. written in -- did the people who worked on the code appear to do it while "thinking in French" or "thinking in English" etc., and how would we know?
    • Translation: Are there different versions of the site? Is one order / organization / set of labels more "natural" to its language than others?
    • Defaults: Which language(s) does the web assume by default should be used first in what situations? Why might one language be prioritized over another?
    • Accessibility: in addition to considering which parts are translated / untranslated and for what groups, consider the greater context of WAI accessibility in relation to disability. Many accessibility systems (e.g. accessible images, interfaces for the visually impaired) are text based -- even if a site is translated or multilingual it may only be accessible to a specific language group.†

    † For example, this working group is currently hosted on Vanilla Forums, which is WCAG AAA and US Section 508 compliant -- at least until participants post images and videos without alt tags. However the setup is monolingual in English.

  • edited January 2018

    @jeremydouglass said:

    • Character encoding issues (e.g. unicode): For example, can users type the characters of their chosen language into site interfaces such as comment or search boxes? If they leave comments, are those characters displayed correctly in their comments? If they search fields, does searching by those characters return correctly indexed results?
    • Code: In HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and/or PHP et cetera think about how the code itself is written, e.g. these languages generally use English vocabulary
    • How was the website made: are the code comments written in French, by French-speaking programmers, or in some other way? What language(s) were the software frameworks, content management systems, templates etc. written in -- did the people who worked on the code appear to do it while "thinking in French" or "thinking in English" etc., and how would we know?
    • Translation: Are there different versions of the site? Is one order / organization / set of labels more "natural" to its language than others?
    • Defaults: Which language(s) does the web assume by default should be used first in what situations? Why might one language be prioritized over another?

    You actually understood my questions. I am looking into the command codes themselves and the words mixed to be in other languages. For example, see this code This code below is taken from the French website but only the String "Nom" that is French whereas all the other command language/code is in English vocabulary.
    "
    ""
    Can't we also think of translating all the programming languages' command into other language vocabularies?

  • I want to echo one of Jeremy's suggestions, which is not looking within a page itself but looking at how many versions of a page, in different languages, exist. This is easy to do on Wikipedia for instance but can also be done on university sites: Look for one directory or file name that is "en" and one that is "fr" for instance. Sometimes you will find that one of these is very short or even blank. Or, maybe the "fr" page links to mostly English resources.

    So, sometimes you can tell which language is the language of power from such an analysis. Or, you might be able to tell what different language communities value. You would expect to see a longer entry about Haitian literary figure Maurice Sixto in the English, French, and Haitian Wikipedias than in the German or Japanese Wikipedias, since he is better known in those language communities.

    In reply to your final question, Waliya, there has been work to do this, for instance with Algol 68: "Translations of the standard were made for Russian, German, French and Bulgarian, and then later Japanese and Chinese." See the English Wikipedia entry on Algol 68 or the (much shorter) French entry if you like.

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